HPE acquires Juniper Networks

On January 8, the first rumors started to emerge that HPE was entering final discussions to acquire Juniper Networks for $13b. By January 9th, HPE announced that they have entered into a definitive agreement for the acquisition.

Juniper Networks, known for its high-performance networking equipment, has been a significant player in the networking and telecommunications sector. It specializes in routers, switches, network management software, network security products, and software-defined networking technology. HPE, on the other hand, has a broad portfolio that includes servers, storage, networking, consulting, and support services.

 The acquisition of Juniper Networks by HPE could be a strategic move to strengthen HPE’s position in the networking and telecommunications sector, diversify its product offerings, and enhance its ability to compete with other major players in the market such as Cisco.

Most analysis I have read so far have pointed out AIOps and Mist AI as the core thesis for acquisition, enabling HPE to bridge the gap between equipment vendor and solution vendor, particularly in the Telco space.

While this is certainly an aspect of the value that Juniper Networks would provide to HPE, I believe that the latest progress from Juniper Networks in Telco beyond transport, particularly as an early leader in the emerging field of RAN Intelligence and SMO (Service Management and Orchestration) was a key catalyst in HPE's interest.

After all, Juniper Networks has been a networking specialist and leader for a long time, from SDN, SD WAN, Optical to data center, wired and wireless networks. While the company has been making great progress there, gradually virtualizing  and cloudifying its routers, firewalls and gateway functions, no revolutionary technology has emerged there until the application of Machine Learning and predictive algorithms to the planning, configuration, deployment and management of transport networks.

What is new as well, is Juniper Networks' efforts to penetrate the telco functions domains, beyond transport. The key area ready for disruption has been the Radio Access Network (RAN), specifically with Open RAN becoming an increasingly relevant industry trend to pervade networks architecture, culminating with AT&T's selection of Ericsson last month to deploy Open RAN for $14B.

Open RAN offers disaggregation of the RAN, with potential multivendor implementations, benefitting from open standard interfaces. Juniper Networks, not a traditional RAN vendor, has been quick to capitalize on its AIOps expertise by jumping on the RAN Intelligence marketspace, creating one of the most advanced RAN Intelligent Controller (RIC) in the market and aggressively integrating with as many reputable RAN vendors as possible. This endeavor, opening up the multi billion $ RAN and SMO markets is pure software and heavily biased towards AI/ML for automation and prediction.

HPE has been heavily investing in the telco space of late, becoming a preferred supplier of Telco CaaS and Cloud Native Functions (CNF) physical infrastructures. What HPE has not been able to do, is creating software or becoming a credible solutions provider / integrator. The acquisition of Juniper Networks could help solve this. Just like Broadcom's acquisition of VMWare (another early RAN Intelligence leader), or Cisco's acquisition of Accedian, hardware vendors yearn to go up the value chain by acquiring software and automation vendors, giving them the capacity to provide integrated end to end solutions and to achieve synergies and economy of scale through vertical integration.

The playbook is not new, but this potential acquisition could signal a consolidation trend in the telecommunications and networking industry, suggesting a more competitive landscape with fewer but larger players. This could have far-reaching implications for customers, suppliers, and competitors alike.

FYUZ 2023 review and opinions on latest Open RAN announcements

 

Last week marked the second edition of FYUZ, the Telecom Infra Project's annual celebration of open and disaggregated networks. TIP's activity, throughout the year, provides a space for innovation and collaboration in telecoms network access, transport and core main domains. The working groups create deployment blueprints as well as implementation guidelines and documentation. The organization also federates a number of open labs, facilitating interoperability, conformance and performance testing.

I was not there are for the show's first edition, last year, but found a lot of valuable insight in this year's. I understand from casual discussion with participants that this year was a little smaller than last, probably due to the fact that the previous edition saw Meta presenting its Metaverse ready networks strategy, which attracted a lot of people outside the traditional telco realm. AT about 1200 attendees, the show felt busy without being overwhelming and the mix of main stage conference content in the morning  and breakout presentations in the afternoon left ample time for sampling the top notch food and browsing the booth. What I found very different in that show also, was how approachable and relaxed attendees were, which allowed for productive and yet casual discussions.

Even before FYUZ, the previous incarnation of the show, the TIP forum was a landmark show for vendors and operators announcing their progress on open and disaggregated networks, particularly around open RAN.

The news that came out of the show this year marked an interesting progress in the technology's implementation, and a possible transition from the trough of disillusion to a pragmatic implementation.

The first day saw big announcements from Santiago Tenorio, TIP's chairman and head of Open RAN at Vodafone. The operator announced that Open RAN's evaluation and pilots were progressing well and that it would, in its next global RFQ for RAN refresh, affecting over 125,000 cell sites see Open RAN gain at least 30% of the planned deployment. The RFQ is due to be released this year for selection in early 2024, as their contracts with existing vendors are due to expire in April 2025.

That same day, Ericsson’s head of networks, Fredrik Jejdling, confirmed the company's support of Open RAN announced earlier this year. You might have read my perspective on Ericsson's stance on Open RAN, the presentation did not change my opinion, but it is a good progress for the industry that the RAN market leader is now officially supporting the technology, albeit with some caveats.

Nokia, on their side announced a 5G Open RAN pilot with Vodafone in Italy, and another pilot successfully completed in Romania, on a cluster of Open RAN sites shared by Orange and Vodafone (MOCN).

While TIP is a traditional conduit for the big 5 European operators to enact their Open RAN strategy, this year saw an event dominated by Vodafone, with a somewhat subdued presence from Deutsche Telekom, Telefonica, Orange and TIM. Rakuten Symphony was notable by its absence, as well as Samsung.

The subsequent days saw less prominent announcements, but good representation and panel participation from Open RAN supporters and vendors. Particularly, Mavenir and Juniper networks were fairly vocal about late Open RAN joiners who do not really seem to embrace multivendor competition and open API / interfaces approach.

I was fortunate to be on a few panels, notably on the main stage to discuss RAN intelligence progress, particularly around the RICs and Apps emergence as orchestration and automation engines for the RAN.

I also presented the findings of my report on the topic, presentation below and moderated a panel on overcoming automation challenges in telecom networks with CI/CD/CT.

Dear Openwave, Juniper is now partnering with RGB Networks

In a solution brief stealthily released this week, Juniper introduces RGB Networks VMG transcoder product within its Media Flow solution as their partner for adaptive streaming.

This solution brief, centered around mobile video delivery uses a lot of the rhetoric associated with mobile TV and TV everywhere, touting computational performance and low heat dissipation for instance. The solutions seems to be addressed at carriers, content owners, cable operators who want to enable their own mobile CDN, rather than relying on Akamai and Limelight.
It is not surprising since it is, after all, RGB's core competency, to extend professional video encoding from cable to mobile networks. Hardware based, high performance adaptive streaming and its three proprietary flavors (Apple's, Microsoft's and Adobe's) seem to be the core of the solution. That is, until their acquisition of Ripcode last year which yielded, beyond a handful of wireless customers and a software based solution, the embryo of video optimization  technology for OTT traffic.




What I find interesting, is that the same solution from Juniper, Media Flow was supposed to be as well the core of the Openwave - Juniper partnership around video optimization announced at Mobile World Congress this year. 
If you remember the press release at the time, "Juniper Networks (NYSE: JNPR) has selected the Company [Openwave] as a strategic partner to integrate its Media Optimizer into Juniper’s Media Flow solution for mobile video optimization".


We all have seen Openwave's struggle to convince the market that they indeed have technology in this space, after over 30 announced trials and customer engagements and only Wattanya Maldives to show as an announced customer in the space.


At the same time, RGB Networks has made many inroads in licensing and OEMing its technology to core networks, VAS and optimization vendors to perform transcoding, not in the mobile TV/mobile CDN space, but for video optimization. Several vendors in the space have embedded their transcoder in their solution.




Reading between the lines, I can't help but think that Juniper might be thinking of RGB as an anchor technology partner for their Media Flow solution. It makes sense to consolidate both the video delivery for on-deck content announced here with the video optimization for OTT content with a single technology partner. At that point, RGB has a lot more references and technology than Openwave.


 I would not be surprised if Openwave's partnership with Juniper was at its end, whether it will be officially acknowledged or not, only 6 months after its announcement.