Building a New Generation of Networks with HPE & Juniper - Six Five On The Road

How is HPE’s acquisition of Juniper Networks reshaping the landscape of AI-driven networking and accelerating innovation in the industry?

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From HPE Discover Barcelona 2025, hosts Will Townsend and Ryan Shrout are joined by HPE’s Rami Rahim, EVP, President & GM, Networking, for a conversation on HPE’s acquisition of Juniper Networks and the strategic moves that position HPE as a leader in AI-native, self-driving networks, via unified AIOps platforms, enhanced integration speed, and upcoming innovations aimed at driving customer value in high-performance, AI-centric networking environments.

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Key Takeaways Include:

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🔹Unified AIOps for AI-native Networks: How the integration of Aruba and Juniper intelligence is advancing HPE’s vision for self-driving, AI-powered network operations and reflects strong momentum from customer engagement at HPE Discover 2025 in Barcelona.

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🔹Strategic Support for AI Architectures: HPE’s announcement of AMD’s Helios AI rack-scale architecture and new scale-up switches differentiate their ‘Networks for AI’ strategy, optimizing networks for demanding AI workloads.

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🔹Rapid Integration & Engineering: Accelerated unification of HPE Aruba and Juniper solutions—occurring in months, not years is fueled by a collaborative culture, with deep engineering resources and synergies for innovation across HPE’s portfolio.

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🔹Disruptive Advances: Leadership anticipates breakthroughs in autonomous networking and complete end-to-end solution integration, with an emphasis on rapid innovation and industry disruption in the coming year.

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Learn more at HPE.

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Will Townsend:

This is Six Five on the Road. We are live from HPE Discover Barcelona 2025. I'm joined by my colleague Ryan. We have saved the best for the last with our livestream series this week. We are speaking with Rami Rahim that leads now the combined Juniper and HPE Aruba networking business unit. Rami, it's always so great to talk to you.

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Rami Rahim:

Thank you. It's great to be here, Will.

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Will Townsend:

Awesome. Awesome. Well, I got to tell you, I shared this with you on social media earlier this week, but I paid a visit to Raleigh Rami, your AI avatar.

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Rami Rahim:

Yes.

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Will Townsend:

And I asked him, like I told you, over X, a very difficult AI networking question.

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Rami Rahim:

And how did he do?

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Will Townsend:

He responded with a recommendation for tapas in Barcelona in Spanish. So was that a hallucination, Rami?

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Rami Rahim:

I'm not sure if really Rami is ready to take over my job quite yet. Let's see if he makes some more progress for next year's Barcelona.

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Will Townsend:

Yeah, well, there'll be plenty of time to train, really, Rami, right?

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Rami Rahim:

I think so.

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Will Townsend:

And I'm wearing my lapel pin as proof.

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Rami Rahim:

I think it looks great on you.

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Will Townsend:

Thank you. I love it. I love it. Well, let's get started. So this is your first Discover.

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Rami Rahim:

It's actually my first Discover as an employee. I was here last year as a guest.

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Will Townsend:

That's right.

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Rami Rahim:

So this one hits different. It is.

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Will Townsend:

It is. And it's got to be sweet for you as well, right?

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Rami Rahim:

Honestly, it's been amazing.

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Will Townsend:

Yeah. Well, so I love the unification of the AIOps, taking the best of, you know, Juniper Mist and Aruba Central, and it's powerful. I've known you for quite some time. You've always had this vision of the AI-native network. So what does this do, the combination of both solutions coming together to really drive the realization of a self-driving network?

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Rami Rahim:

Yeah, a lot of our customers are asking us that question because we have two very powerful platforms today, Aruba Central and Mist. They're both They're leaders in the industry when it comes to AI operations, but they both have different sort of sweet spots in terms of strength. Mist is a cloud-native platform. Aruba Central has much more of a diverse use case across virtual private cloud and on-prem. So the approach we're taking is pretty simple. It is to take the best of each and cross-pollinate them onto the other. In so doing, what are we going to do? We're going to accelerate the pace of innovation across both platforms. We're going to address every deployment model from on-prem to VPC to public cloud. and we're gonna essentially give all of our customers the ability to participate in this accelerated innovation irrespective of their starting point. That is not just the vision, but we put the vision into actual action by delivering the first cross-pollinated microservices that we demoed on stage in this morning and yesterday, and we'll deliver in just weeks from now.

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Will Townsend:

There'll be a common hardware platform, right, that you can run both solutions?

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Rami Rahim:

Absolutely right. I mean, we're showing that we can cross-pollinate not just the software and the microservices, but also the hardware capabilities. So by roughly the middle of next year, you'll have your first access point that will have a dual platform capability working equally well with Mist and Aruba Central. So our customers will have the peace of mind that their investments are 100% protected. Yeah, I mean, the progress we've made in just a few months is pretty amazing.

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Will Townsend:

Five months, right? Five months. Am I calculating that correctly? I mean, the close was a little bit longer tail than I think you or Antonio expected.

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Rami Rahim:

Yes.

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Will Townsend:

But it's amazing to see the engineering teams come together within such a short amount of time. And you're demonstrating those integrations today. Absolutely.

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Rami Rahim:

Pretty powerful. Yeah. I mean, I have to say, it's gone easier and faster than I expected. And people ask me why. And I think it starts with a very basic thing, culture. The culture of the two teams are very similar, very customer driven, extremely technology oriented. And so we're now on one team, essentially executing on a common vision, a common strategy, and we're making a lot of progress.

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Ryan Shrout:

Now, I'm fundamentally a performance guy. I love to talk about CPU performance, GPUs, networking, all of that. One of the most exciting things for me here was the HP announcement of working with AMD and kind of being one of the launch partners for the Helios rack. And as part of that, there's a new scale-up switch involved in it there. I'm curious, like, what are the technological innovations in that that are, you know, addressing an incredibly powerful system like what Helios will be? Yeah. And also how that applies to kind of your broader networks for AI strategy.

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Rami Rahim:

So we're extremely proud of our partnership with AMD. Helios is an incredible rack-scale AI solution. And we're going to be one of the first companies to deliver a Helios rack. As part of Helios, we're taking Ethernet to a new layer of the AI data center. I mean, Ethernet started out as scale-out technology. The scale-up network is still largely not Ethernet, and we are moving it to Ethernet with this architectural approach. The technical barriers are not small. I mean, these are extremely high-performance switch. The scale-up capacity is enormous. These switches are such high-performance and such high-performance density that you need to have 100% liquid cooling technology. Liquid cooling is not easy. No.

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Will Townsend:

Something that HPE has been focused on for quite some time now, right?

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Rami Rahim:

That's exactly the point. I love that. That's exactly the point. HPE has been doing liquid cooling technology as part of their high-performance computing systems for years and years. And we were able to tap into that immediately post-close. And as a result of that, have already announced our Tomahawk 6-base QFX 5250, 100% liquid cool. and also this dedicated Ethernet scale-up switch for the Helios RackScale architecture. Again, in just a few short months, it's pretty amazing what we were able to do.

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Will Townsend:

During the networking general session, you and the team sort of spoke about the four areas of focus, campus branch, data center, routing, security. And I just love your excitement when I see you on stage. I think earlier today, Ryan and I were recording Or it may have been another colleague, and I kind of called you the networking whisperer, because you're so excited about the potential of what's going on here in the future. But let me ask you, what excites you the most, looking at those four areas, given what you've accomplished just in a short five months?

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Rami Rahim:

Well, first of all, you can't fake excitement. I mean, I can't fake excitement. So when you see excitement for me coming up on stage, it's because I genuinely am excited. And typically for me, the excitement comes from technology. I'm a technologist at heart. And when we deliver great products that solve meaningful problems for our customers, I find that just incredibly motivating. I can't pick a favorite. I just can't. I love them all. I mean, in the data center space, we have absolutely pushed the envelope with our liquid-cooled switching now based on Tomahawk 6 technology. In the routing space, we talked about the PTX being a data center interconnect solution now working very tightly with NVIDIA. We also announced a new product, the MX301, which is an on-ramp for the inference edge that has all of the flexibility and capabilities that our customers love about the MX, but in a small form factor power and cost optimized. So that's really interesting and exciting. In the campus and branch, as we just discussed, we're showing real progress in how our platforms are coming together and we're accelerating the pace of innovation in both software and hardware for our customers. And then even the security, I mean, we have so much to offer right now across the Aruba and the Juniper portfolios. One innovation that I'm incredibly proud of that's already in the market is the SRX 4700, the world's fastest quantum safe firewall by a mile. We're doing in one rack unit what others take 14 rack units to do with industry best, like proven through third party testing efficacy.

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Will Townsend:

And I love the complementary nature of the two companies coming together. You, when you were the CEO at Juniper, very historically strong in service provider, also very strong just within data center, right? And for HPE Aruba, data center was somewhat of a weakness, right? So I see the two coming together and one plus one far equals beyond two. It's a force multiplier for Microsoft.

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Rami Rahim:

Well, I can't agree more. There is so much complementarity between the solutions. But also don't forget that the thing that we can benefit from right now as a part of this combination is just the go-to-market scale.

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Will Townsend:

Right. The channel and all that, right?

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Rami Rahim:

The number of sellers. in networking has doubled and the number of sellers worldwide that are selling servers and compute and hybrid cloud. Guess what? Each of these solutions have networking ports that we can attach networking to. And then, like you said, the partner community. I mean, networking now has 47,000 partners that are ready and eager and interested. I've met with many of them at this event to sell the broader portfolio across all of these different domains.

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Ryan Shrout:

We were talking earlier about the speed of integration and how you attributed that to culture. I'm curious, what do you see as the next steps of that integration and what will be the next proceeds of it? Is it something like this sales breadth that the combination with HPE provided?

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Rami Rahim:

So we've already made a lot of progress in unifying our engineering teams, our product teams, and this is why we were able to make these announcements at this event. The next step is sales. So our sales day one, where we have a harmonized single sales team that approaches the global opportunity as one team, starts beginning of January. So we've been working diligently to get prepped for that important milestone, and we are ready.

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Ryan Shrout:

We have 25 days.

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Rami Rahim:

We have 25 days, but fortunately we didn't just start. We've been working on it for several months right now.

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Will Townsend:

There's some clean room activity.

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Rami Rahim:

We are absolutely ready. And I have to say, you know, this is where the rigor And the attention that HPE has put onto this integration effort is really amazing. I mean, everybody is involved. From Antonio through the organization and the board of directors, they want to see this combination be very successful. So yes, I feel like I have all of the support and the resources across all of HPE to make this into a real success story.

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Will Townsend:

Love it, love it. Well, as we wind the conversation down, Rami, we've talked about your excitement, your enthusiasm. Often when you and I have met, you've talked about the opportunity for market disruption. As you look out over the next 12 months, what do you see as that market disruption opportunity? Is there anything, one particular thing that you can point to?

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Rami Rahim:

Yeah, I think if you take a look at what's happened over the last few years, especially in the domain of AI operations and this path towards a vision of a self-driving network, the progress has been immense. And I don't think it's been immense by accident. I think we drove a lot of the innovation that has enabled that progress. We've gone from an era of basically just getting insights from network to now deriving from those insights, like assisted driving type of situations where your hands are not on off the wheel, but the network is making some autonomous decisions, but with a lot of human interaction. Now with the gentic AI, I think the opportunity is truly self-driving, truly self-driving. And with the, combined scale, especially in the domain of AI operations across Juniper and HPE Aruba, I think getting to a completely self-driving network is going to get, it's just going to happen faster, like definitely within the next five years. So I'm excited about that, you know, not just the vision, but the pace of execution we are making towards that vision.

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Will Townsend:

Yeah, and the opportunity to lean into agentic AI frameworks to drive that automation. I think there still needs to be some trust built up in AI, and I think we're making progress as I talk to customers. But truly, the benefit at the end of the day for network operations team and security operations team is pushing that mundane CLI-based activity and being able to focus on driving real value-add for the lines of businesses that are supported, right?

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Rami Rahim:

Yeah, yeah, totally. I mean, look, a few years ago, nobody would have thought that there would be cars without drivers running through the streets of San Francisco. Guess what? That's happening right now. So it's coming. And the benefit's going to be enormous. It's going to really enable IT teams to focus on what's much more important, which is driving their businesses forward, avoiding disruption, innovating, and disrupting others. That's what all IT teams want. So it's coming, and I think it's going to be very, very powerful and beneficial to the industry.

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Will Townsend:

It's exciting. It's going to be fun to watch how this all unfolds for you and the team. So Rami, thanks for taking the time to speak with us today. It's been great.

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Rami Rahim:

I really appreciate it. I enjoyed it very much.

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Will Townsend:

Awesome. Awesome. Well, so that is Six Five On The Road live from Barcelona and we're signing off.

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