Hewlett Packard Enterprise CEO Antonio Neri's comments about the deal closing by the end of this year or early 2025 come after a Bloomberg report raised the specter of a possible U.S. Department of Justice antitrust challenge to the Juniper Networks acquisition.

Hewlett Packard Enterprise CEO Antonio Neri told several thousand attendees Wednesday at the HPE Discover Barcelona conference that the hybrid cloud powerhouse is still hoping to close its $14 billion acquisition of Juniper Networks by the end of the year or early 2025.

Neri said the blockbuster deal is aimed squarely at accelerating innovation and transforming HPE at its "core" into a networking company. "This is huge for customers because they need seamless, scalable solutions without operational headaches," he said.

Neri, who was joined on stage by Juniper Networks CEO Rami Rahim to discuss the benefits of the deal, told the Juniper CEO: "I'm as excited as you. We hope to close this end of the year or early 2025. ... The next few years are going to be incredibly interesting for both our customers, our companies and our employees as we together address this amazing opportunity."

The duo's appearance at the event came in the wake of a Bloomberg report that HPE and Juniper representatives met with U.S. Department of Justice (DOJ) regulators last week in a bid to prevent an antitrust challenge to HPE's planned acquisition of its networking rival.

DOJ officials, Bloomberg reported, are ready to "challenge the deal if necessary and have made their concerns known" to HPE and Juniper, but no final decision on whether to bring a lawsuit has been reached.

Bloomberg reported that a decision on whether to challenge the deal could be made as soon as this week. The media outlet also reported that HPE and Juniper "may choose to delay the deal until President-elect Donald Trump's administration takes over in January in the hopes of a more favorable view" of the deal.

HPE partners have told CRN that if the HPE-Juniper acquisition is not approved they risk losing "tens of millions of dollars" in potential networking-as-a-service and AI sales opportunities that would come with the deal.

"We had already put together an aggressive sales effort for next year based on the HPE Juniper acquisition," said C.R. Howdyshell, CEO of Advizex, a Fulcrum IT Partners company and a top HPE and Aruba partner. "Antonio has already declared that HPE was going to be a networking company. We believe we would miss out on a significant opportunity if this deal is not approved. ... We have already put the wheels in motion on this."

When asked by Neri the "purpose" of the blockbuster deal, Rahim said: "It's about more than just combining strengths to create the best networking business on the planet. I think it is about transforming what networks can do for all those that use them, from delivering better experiences with traditional applications to meeting the growing demands of AI workloads."

Rahim said Juniper has been building AI networks for the last nine years with its Mist AI product, resulting in network automation that was heretofore simply not possible.

"We're using Mist AI to predict issues before they even happen," he said. "We are reducing Opex by up to 85 percent in some instances and cutting network downtime significantly."

As a combined company, HPE and Juniper will have "more customers, more networks, and more devices deployed around the planet," said Rahim. "So that means our leading AIOps capabilities are only going to become smarter and even more effective, basically ensuring the best end-to-end experiences for our customers and of course amazing experiences for those operators that are running the networks today."

Rahim said Juniper's Marvis virtual assistant enables network administrators to use GenAI to ask questions like: "Are there any unhappy users on my network right now?"

Juniper has worked with "countless customers" to reduce troubleshooting time and operational costs" and is now getting "very, very close to virtually eliminating all trouble tickets," said Rahim. "It's pretty amazing," he said. "It's huge."

ServiceNow has reduced its network trouble tickets by 90 percent by utilizing Mist AI, said Rahim. "Ultimately we let IT staff focus on more strategic things," he said.