By Claus Hetting, WiFi NOW CEO Chairman
The US Department of Justice’s anti-trust lawsuit filed in February of this year to stop HPE from acquiring Juniper has now been settled out of court, the DoJ says in a notice here. The DoJ now requires that the combined company within 180 days auction away a license for Mist’s AIOps source code as well as find buyers for HPE’s ‘instant On’ SME Wi-Fi business. Both HPE and Juniper stocks surged on the news. The Wi-Fi industry impact is unclear.
Th DoJ’s anti-trust lawsuit against HPE – which has rattled the professional WLAN industry since February – has now finally been settled out of court but the result and its impact is a little baffling. The anti-trust case was based on DoJ’s analysis that the combined company together with Cisco would represent 70% enterprise WLAN market share, and that this would limit competition. The number will not change under the settlement but what will – in theory – change (according to the settlement) is an unknown company’s ability to compete.
This means that HPE will acquire Juniper as planned and that HPE will be permitted to operate all Mist current assets (including AIOps) but that one licensee for Mists’s AIOps has to be found via auction. The question then becomes what company would be interested in acquiring the software or whether such a company exists. Another question is whether acquiring the software alone is technically meaningful since the stack is unlikely to have been designed with an API for third-party access.
Our conclusion is that HPE and Juniper likely got what they wanted, a finding echoed by Wall Street’s bullish sentiment. Whether the terms of the settlement in the end will make any difference to the competitive landscape for enterprise WLAN seems doubtful. Note that it in theory would be possible for Cisco to acquire the Mist AIOps license even if it were only to take it off the market (although we’re guessing that this is highly unlikely to happen).
Juniper/Mist continues its stellar performance
Mist was founded in 2014 and revolutionised enterprise WLAN with an AI-native architecture including the industry’s first (and one of the world’s first) large language models for network operations. The company quickly demonstrated the benefits of their approach and was years ahead of the competition at the time. Mist was acquired by Juniper in 2019 and end-to-end AIOps have since been extended to support Juniper’s entire networking portfolio.
Mist’s platform was exceptional at launch and – given its pedigree and subsequent success – may still be the most advanced. But it is far from the only AIOps platform available today. All major WLAN vendors already incorporate their own AIOps software in some form, which means finding a buyer for the Mist license may prove difficult. It is more likely that someone will pick up HPE’s ‘instant ON’ SMB business but we’re guessing that the value of such a deal will be based on the size of the company’s customer base.
Meanwhile there can be no question that Mist’s financial and technical performance continues to be stellar. Yesterday, Juniper announced that it has been positioned in Gartner’s highly coveted ‘Magic Quadrant’ for wireless and wired LAN infrastructure for the fifth consecutive year, this time for ‘Completeness of Vision’ and ‘Ability to Execute’. Ironically, Juniper’s nearest competitor is HPE.
Juniper is clear that the company’s success is attributable to AI. “Continued customer traction for its Mist AI-native networking platform and the Marvis AI engine has been the defining factor in accelerating sales momentum in the enterprise sector with orders for Mist and other products attached to the Mist cloud growing more than 40 percent year-over-year in Q1 2025,” Juniper says.
/Claus.
