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HPE has long had a big presence at Mobile World Congress, but this year marks a shift. This year was its first MWC after the merger with Juniper Networks, and while court cases rumble on there’s no doubt that the new company is a powerful force. It’s this momentum that provided the thread throughout my interview with AE Natarajan, EVP and Chief Development Officer for HPE Juniper Networks at the show.
AE Natarajan is softly spoken, perhaps because his experience speaks for itself. He joined Juniper Networks in late 2016 as SVP of Engineering before being elevated into his current role for Juniper Networks in 2022, with a particular focus on routers. That includes the industrial-strength routers found in cloud providers, telcos and data centres, with two new products announced the week prior to MWC.
Before Juniper, Natarajan spent many years with some of the biggest names in comms and networking – a combined total of almost two decades at Polycom, Cisco and, in his early years, Novell. All of which means that Natarajan was better positioned than most to answer my first question: how much does HPE Juniper Networks have Cisco in its sights?
Gently, as his wont, Natarajan rephrased my question. “We want to become the number one,” he explained. “In order to do that, we look at not just networking, we look at what we bring together as two companies. Sometimes my CEO says we’re unfairly awarded with the most amount of assets that we can have.”
Despite dodging my direct question about Cisco, it didn’t take long for Natarajan to assess that the current networking supremo was now at a disadvantage. “If you really look at [HPE’s] compute, storage to networking as a full-stack entity from end to end, you can’t do the same thing with Cisco. [Does Cisco offer] compute and storage? Not as much.”
Then Natarajan pointed to “the other side”. That is, companies who are strong in compute and storage such as Dell and Lenovo (although he didn’t name them), but who he suggests are “not necessarily [strong] in networking”. It’s this unique ability that HPE Juniper Networks has and “the ability for us to actually take this and stitch this together” that’s making people at the company excited, he said.
Later in our interview, returning to the theme, Natarajan added that the company now has “a full stack strength that will enable us to compete well with companies like Cisco, which had the easiest stack, with networking, with everything that they could compete with. And there were many cases where, if you didn’t have the full stack, the customers say, oh, okay, you know what, I’m going to make a choice one way or the other, right?
“So that was exciting for us. That was the biggest revelation.”
It took 18 months from HPE’s announced acquisition of Juniper Networks in January 2024 to the deal’s completion. and Natarajan admitted that was far longer than expected. But might it have actually worked out in the duo’s favour as they had time to plan, I asked?
“That gave us time to really work in clean rooms about how we integrated,” agreed Natarajan, although he added that things “became a lot more clear” when in July 2025 when the news became official.
So how have things worked out since? “First and foremost, the cultures of the two organisations resonated very well, driven by innovation,” said Natarajan. “The second part of it is some of the areas where we really thought that there would be healthy or unhealthy overlap became a lot more demystified… during the integration process, as we embarked on the journey.
“We found that we had, like I said, an unfair amount of rich assets across the portfolio, plus the full stack,” he added. “As Juniper, the way I see it, is we were always limited by our reach. This [merger] gave us a much wider reach and, internally, it also gave us a much bigger company managing our supply.”
For Natarajan there was the added benefit that HPE didn’t offer any overlapping products in his area. “We didn’t have conflicts because I do routing. It’s pretty much isolated, complementary, adds on to the whole thing.”
For example, while HPE promoted AI servers at last year’s MWC, this year’s news of two AI-native routers could previously only have come from Juniper Networks.
One of the big reasons that HPE bought Juniper Networks boils down to AI. In particular, tools such as Mist AI that make managing complex networks simpler and anticipate problems before they occur. The obvious parallel is with self-driving cars, but here it’s the networks that drive – and heal – themselves.
Natarajan pointed out in our interview that this didn’t come about overnight, with Juniper Networks’ beginning its work in this area soon after 2010. Long before ChatGPT caught the world’s attention in November 2022. Natarajan specifically mentioned HPE Juniper Networks’ CTO Kireeti Kompella. “You can go back and look at his YouTube videos about self-driving networks. He’s been talking [about it] almost 12 to 15 years ago.”
After the interview, I did indeed check through YouTube, and you can see Kompella talking about self-driving networks in a keynote at CENIC 2018, for instance.
“The genesis was we were starting to see the transition from the internet era, where you’re trying to get everybody online, and then moving over to the cloud and the mobility era,” said Natarajan.
“We started seeing an importance for getting automation telemetry. We were the first to invent model-based telemetry… and that becomes the first elements of rich data collection for the network, for us to be able to start building correlation engines, AI models and training them and building on top of that.
“So we were thinking about self driving way, way back. But the idea of that gets better and better as we’re moving towards this new era with AI and AI tools available to us. That makes it a lot more interesting.”
To finish, I asked Natarajan about his hopes for the rest of the year. “Service providers are an important customer base for us,” he said, referring to HPE’s presence at MWC 2026 in particular. “We also do extremely well with cloud providers, who are growing exponentially, much bigger, and with enterprises too.”
Meeting at events such as MWC also means that HPE Juniper Networks can build on their partnerships. “I firmly believe in not having a vendor-customer relationship. You really need to have a partnership with almost any of your customers, which means the ability for you to understand what they do, how they do [it] and how to enable their business better.”
For service providers, Natarajan explained, that meant “to work with them strategically on the transformation that AI is bringing about. How can service providers participate in this whole ecosystem to build on edge services, inferencing, things like that. So that’s exciting.”
And in terms of 2026 in particular? “There is something special about 2026 because [previously] most of what you actually see in the spend and in terms of [what] people are doing, has been largely training models,” he said. “Inference is catching up and it’s picking up. So the ability to pick that transition and build on top of it is interesting. We released our MX301 as an inference router for exactly the same reasons.”
Natarajan concluded: “It’s an exciting 2026 ahead… with both the PTX12008 [and] our MX announcements, really exciting. It’s an exciting innovation right there [on the showfloor] for people to see, look and touch and feel.”
