HPE promises “cross pollinated" future for Aruba and Juniper

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published 3 December 2025

The question of how HPE will integrate Juniper Networks’ technology into its existing networking portfolio has moved a step closer to resolution at HPE Discover Europe 2025.

Speaking to journalists ahead of the event, Rami Rahim – formerly CEO of Juniper Networks, now EVP and GM of HPE Networking – said the business’ goal is to “unify the experience of these two platforms by leveraging the microservices architecture for both and cross pollinating capabilities from one onto another”.

What this means in practice, for now at least, is that both Juniper and Aruba Central will co-exist within HPE. Some of the technologies, however, will be migrated to where the company believes they fit best.

Marvis, a virtual assistant previously described by Juniper as a “key part of the Juniper AI native networking platform”, and Large Experience Models (LEM) will be moving over to Aruba Central. The rationale behind this, Rahim said, is that both these capabilities are AIOps, which is where Aruba Central is strongest.

Meanwhile, client profiling and organizational insights from Aruba Central will move over to Juniper Mist.

Rahim was keen to emphasize that integration “over time” didn’t mean at some point in the distant future, adding that these initial changes will be happening “in the first quarter of next year (2026)”.

“This is just the beginning,” added Rahim. “We're going to continue to do this cross pollination, and as we do this, we're going to bring the best of both platforms to all users. Nobody gets left behind.”

At the hardware level, there’s also a unification strategy underway, with the announcement of a dual platform Wi-Fi 7 access point (AP), which works across both Aruba Networking Central and Aruba Networking Mist.

Describing this as the “first of many” of this type of hardware, Rahim said: “This is a huge breakthrough [with] massive advantages for our customers, starting with flexibility. Dual platform design lets our customers choose their preferred control point, whether it's Mist or Aruba Central, and switch seamlessly between the two platforms as their needs evolve, with no new hardware involved in that decision.”

New Juniper products hit the market

HPE also took the wraps off two new Juniper Networking products at the conference: a new switch – the QFX5250 – and a new multiservice edge router – the MX301.

The QFX5250 switch connects GPUs within data centers. It’s built on Broadcom Tomahawk 6 chips, offers 102.Tbps bandwidth and, according to HPE, is “the world’s highest performance Ultra Ethernet Transport ready switch”.

The MX301 router, meanwhile, delivers speeds of 1.6 Tbps and offers 400G connectivity across diverse environments and use cases, the company said, such as AI inference, mobile backhaul, enterprise routing, and multiservice.

HPE Aruba Networking Central On-Premises 3 also gets a lick of paint with a redesigned user interface. Additionally, the software now also incorporates both “advanced generative [AI]” and traditional AIOps capabilities, as well as proactive remediation, simplified documentation search and what HPE described as “actionable AI alerts”.

Juniper technology has also taken center stage in other announcements from HPE Discover 2025, including in the company’s Helios partnership with AMD and the soon-to-open HPE AI Factory Lab in Grenoble, France.

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Jane McCallion is Managing Editor of ITPro and ChannelPro, specializing in data centers, enterprise IT infrastructure, and cybersecurity. Before becoming Managing Editor, she held the role of Deputy Editor and, prior to that, Features Editor, managing a pool of freelance and internal writers, while continuing to specialize in enterprise IT infrastructure, and business strategy.

Prior to joining ITPro, Jane was a freelance business journalist writing as both Jane McCallion and Jane Bordenave for titles such as European CEO, World Finance, and Business Excellence Magazine.