Several readers have asked: "What do you think of the HPE / Juniper merger completed last month?
And yes, our nephew's wife has worked at HP and now HPE, in networking, for two decades. Plus I've known Tom Black from his early HP days to his Cisco days to his Aruba days and HPE days, before his shift to HPE Storage (https://blocksandfiles.com/2020/07/28/hpe-storage-takes-the-black/) in 2020. Tom is currently on sabbatical, and out of the networking game for awhile now. HPE's Aruba division is currently at a $5 billion annual run-rate.
The Big Kahuna, of course, is Cisco. I did have the privilege of doing 150+ interviews of early Cisco folk for the Cisco Foundation a few years ago, which was a tremendous opportunity. AND, I did get the 'award' from Cisco for being 'the guy who made Cisco successful' from none other than the EVP of Engineering, Joel Bion, when I was hosted to talk about Ray Price's and my book, The HP Phenomenon, in 2010. Boy, did that surprise me! I briefly thought, "Well, why didn't I get any founder's stock?"
That story turned out to be interesting. Cisco couldn't get any traction in the Local Area Networking milieu in the early to mid-1980's. Their gig was Wide Area Networking, connecting Networks of Networks. But the VCs, some 70+ of them, turned Cisco down for years. If there aren't yet many LANs, what is the point of building a WAN to connect some non-existent LANs?
Thanks to a serendipitous connection to Cisco from Bert Raphael in Corporate Engineering, and a project that he and Tony Fanning led to tie all of HP's far-flung engineering operations 'together' via computer teleconferencing (https://dl.acm.org/doi/pdf/10.1145/637069.637109), HP became the leading commercial purchaser of Cisco routers in 1985, with Mark Laubach and his college mentor, David Farber, serving as lead designers, along with Hank Taylor in HP's IT shop. Laubach is now at Ciena, another modestly successful networking company.
No, let me put it more strongly about the HP and Cisco synergy--HP was the ONLY corporate purchaser of Cisco routers for 28 months, from May 1985 until September 1987, when Boeing bought one, partially due to Dave Packard's recommendation, while he was on Boeing's Board of Directors. And I was the person who signed the original Cisco Purchase Order for HP, with co-founders Len Bosack and Sandy Lerner sitting in my conference room at the HP Deer Creek facility.
And you might have read the Sandy Lerner article that I wrote in 2016 for the Computer History Museum (https://computerhistory.org/wp-content/uploads/2020/01/core-2016.pdf). Her story is an intriguing one, notable for a number of reasons which we'll skip here.
It is also perhaps worth noting that a remarkable man, unfortuantely a paraplegic, Jim Pelkey, conducted an amazing set of 81 interviews of the key networking founders and leaders in 20+ companies and 12 other organizations and institutions during the 1986-1988 period. He omitted Cisco, because they didn't yet amount to anything (his view). These were audio interviews that the Computer History Museum eschewed in 2012, until I weighed in to say "THIS IS THE HISTORY". Amazing how myopic and prejudicial, groups can be on occasion. I flew to Hawaii to interview Pelkey, and to review his voluminous materials. Then we got some contributed money, and a true historian (Andy Russell), and they've now all been transcribed and put on line at CHM, and there is even an ACM book (Circuits, Packets, and Protocols https://www.amazon.com/Circuits-Packets-Protocols-Entrepreneurs-Communications/dp/1450397271) that details much of this.
All this prelude is to say that I've had occasional small glimpses of the networking world, including ACM interviews with Bob Metcalfe (3Com), and a partnership with Bill Krause (3Com) along the way, plus Andy Bechtolsheim about Arista, and . . . . So, the point of all of that dialogue is to say that I've had some fascinating opportunities around the networking world.
Okay, so what's the scoop on HPE with Juniper, and how does that stack up with Cisco and Arista?
Well, first of all, Juniper was a sterling challenger to Cisco at the turn of the century, growing spectacularly from $4M in 1998 to $675M in 2001, with a market share of 33% in routers, dinging Cisco's early dominance dramatically. Billed as a David and Goliath face-off, the two fought hard battles over the next decade, with acquisitions and new product claims and all sorts of hoopla. Juniper revenues, though, plateaued after 2010, roughly at $5 Billion per year (Figure 1), while Cisco has not done much better (Figure 2). Cisco, of course, is ten times bigger, clearing $56.6 Billion in the past 12 months (to August 2025).
By contrast, newcomers, especially Arista (founded by Andy Bechtolsheim in 2004 after he sold another company to Cisco), is managed by seasoned network executives (mostly from Cisco), has grown nicely, particularly after introducing the software-defined networking products. These have been around for two decades, but until Arista solved the access speed problem, they were not much in favor. Now, the clear technology winner is software-defined network solutions, and their run-rate at $8 billion (past 12 months) is 50% larger than either Juniper, or HPE Aruba. Surprise! And the only significant annual growth-rate for all of these companies is Arista, at a stunning 31% per year compound rate for the past 12 years.
Here is a synopsis of the various definitional differences for Cisco, HPE/Juniper, and Arista. Ciena had a nice early contribution, but in truth Ciena lacks momentum at this point.
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