“[T]here are no rules in street fights.” That was the view of one HPE sales boss when going head-to-head with Juniper Networks’ “Mist” back in 2021.
“Kill MIST!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!” he wrote in an email.
Mist Systems had been bought by Juniper Networks, in a deal that closed in April 2019. It was going head-to-head with HPE in the WLAN market, had ambitions to “take a serious chunk out of the $20 billion networking industry” and was bringing innovative “AIOps” features to the table.
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“Having failed to beat Mist on the merits, HPE changed tactics and in January 2024 opted to try to buy Juniper instead. That decision puts at risk myriad consumer benefits that have resulted from competition between Defendants in the market for enterprise-grade WLAN solutions.” alleged the Department of Justice (DOJ), in a complaint on January 30.
Justice Department sues to stop HPE’s Juniper buyout
The DOJ this week sued to block HPE’s $14 billion buyout of Juniper Networks – taking a harsher view on potential competition risk than European and British regulators, who waved the deal through.
“The proposed transaction would eliminate fierce head-to-head competition between the companies, raise prices, reduce innovation, and diminish choice,” the DOJ said in a complaint filed January 30, 2025.
It shared examples of HPE scrambling to innovate and compete with Juniper Networks in the complaint, and included an email from HPE’s former Senior Vice President for Sales in the Americas saying that he was “personally involved in five Head to Head street fights with Mist” – and which included that 43-exclamation mark exhortation to “kill Mist”.
Competition for Cisco is needed...
“Many WLAN customers suffer from ‘Cisco fatigue’ due, among other things, to Cisco’s overlapping WLAN product portfolios… and complex licensing practices” the DOJ complaint claims. Innovation by Juniper in the WLAN segment meanwhile has “forced HPE to discount its offerings and invest in its own innovation” in a market that is already highly concentrated: “Cisco and Defendants [HPE and Juniper] collectively represent over 70 percent of it,” the complaint concluded.
The UK’s CMA had taken a far less combative view.
The deal “does not give rise to a realistic prospect of a substantial lessening of competition” it said in its findings. (In the WLAN segment CommScope, Fortinet and Ubiquiti are all serious competitors; in Campus Switches Arista, Extreme, Fortinet all compete, the watchdog said.)
"Fundamentally flawed"
Juniper and HPE called the lawsuit "fundamentally flawed” and vowed to battle it in the courts, as some industry observers noted that Cisco has munched up scores of competitors without many anti-trust headwinds.
The new Trump administration has been thought to be far less hostile to M&A activity than its predecessor. As the partners at law firm Holland & Knight put it in a recent blog: “With President Joe Biden's departure, aggressive antitrust enforcers at the… DOJ Antitrust Division and the FTC will hand over the reins to incoming Trump Administration appointees who do not share their predecessors' dogmatic commitment to an anti-monopoly (sometimes derisively referred to as "hipster antitrust") agenda.”
"I’m pretty shocked. The financial analysts I have talked to recently expected the incoming administration would be very favorable to M&A," one partner executive told channel news site CRN. "My first thought was this must be a holdover from outgoing DOJ leadership, so I was shocked this assistant attorney general was appointed just recently by the new administration."
