While waiting for a resolution of the Department of Justice’s lawsuit to block the $14 billion proposed HPE-Juniper deal, the tech world reached a consensus on two things: the DoJ should not stope the deal, and Cisco would be the loser if it went through.

Well, now that the DoJ dropped its suit after a few minor concessions of HPE, the first conclusion stands up a true. But don’t be so sure about Cisco taking the brunt of the HPE Arista Networks and Juniper Networks wireless combo, even if it does alter the market.

HPE agreed to purchase Juniper in January 2024 but the DoJ in January 2025 sued to block the deal, saying it would give too much of the wireless LAN market to Cisco and HPE. But Cisco already has a huge lead in the WLAN market and HPE-Juniper should actually increase competition.

“In my opinion, this has always been a weak argument as Cisco’s share is so large that it plus almost anyone would have dominant share,” ZK Research analyst Zeus Kerravala wrote in a SiliconANGLE article. “Also, history has shown that dominant share can always be eroded quickly when markets transition.”

WLAN Market Share

In the first quarter of 2025, Cisco owned 39.5% market share in enterprise WLAN revenue according to IDC. That’s the same share Cisco had for full year 2024. HPE Aruba was a distant second at 15.9% last quarter, up slightly from 15.2% for 2024. Juniper was fifth with 5.3% last quarter, up from 5.1% in 2024.

Those numbers show why the industry was baffled by the Justice Department’s opposition to the deal. Cisco still has a commanding lead over the combined HPE and Juniper revenue and there are other players such as Arista, Extreme, Ubiquiti and Huawei (outside the U.S.) that still make it a competitive market. The HPE Aruba-Juniper combination still has long way to go to unseat Cisco, especially considering how complicated these large acquisitions can be to integrate.

Stuart Wilson, IDC senior research director of EMEA partnering ecosystems, told Channel Futures that the integration will be complicated process.

“While this alignment offers a potentially opportune moment for HPE to present a more cohesive edge-to-cloud offering to EMEA partners, integrating Juniper’s distinct partner base remains a complex undertaking,” Wilson said. “The success in rapidly merging varied specializations, compensation structures and customer relationships will be crucial in determining future success.”

Juniper CEO Rami Rahim, who will lead the HPE Networking business, said he’s “rolling up his sleeves” on developing a thoughtful integration strategy but it’s too early for specifics or a timeline.

Cisco and HPE overlap in the data center but focus on different areas of switching. Cisco goes more after hyperscalers and HPE plays primarily in the mid-size enterprise.

Jack Gold, founder and principal at J.Gold Associates identified another target for HPE-Juniper.

“I’d say HPE is looking to compete more with Dell and its capabilities, than directly with Cisco,” Gold told Fierce Network, referring to the already hot competition between Dell and HPE in servers and other infrastructure segments.

HPE CEO Antonio Neri placed more emphasis on usual on networking at HPE Discover 2025 last month, even before the deal was approved. After receiving approval last Saturday, Neri said Juniper will aid HPE’s performance with all-important AI workloads.

“We're not just building a stronger company, we are establishing an industry powerhouse with a vision scale and innovation that define and lead the future, one that will serve our customers and partners better than ever, and imagine what is possible,” HPE Antonio Neri said during a media briefing Tuesday when the deal closed.”

Rahim said he’s “basically devoted my career to competing with the large players in our industry, including Cisco” but HPE is also focused on cloud, compute, storage and software.

As part of its deal with the DoJ, HPE must divest its Instant On enterprise Wi-Fi equipment business and auction licenses for Juniper Mist AI source code to help rivals compete with the merged company. Neri said the Instant On divestiture only involves its AI operations and the Mist code is a "very small" part of HPE's business.