HPE Security Ramped Up Post-Juniper Acquisition With SASE Copilot; Expanded NAC For Juniper, Cisco Devices

‘I think the Juniper investment, as well as some of these SASE and NAC developments, is certainly making people look at HPE from a different lens,’ one HPE partner tells CRN of the company’s secure networking focus.

Hewlett Packard Enterprise is adding to its secure networking portfolio with a handful of AI-powered announcements that mark the company’s first public collaboration with Juniper Networks since the close of the $13.4 billion blockbuster acquisition last month.

HPE Tuesday unveiled a new SASE AI-powered “copilot” for the HPE Aruba Networking EdgeConnect offering. The company also is expanding the reach of its HPE Aruba Networking Central Network Access Control (NAC) technology so it can apply zero-trust policy enforcement and application intelligence to both HPE Juniper Networking and third-party devices, such as Cisco products, the company announced at Black Hat 2025.

HPE over the last year has launched a number of new AI-powered capabilities to help battle cybersecurity threats, such as the NAC infusion that HPE Aruba Central received in April.

“We’re bringing it into the network instead of the customer having separate applications or products. We know that, especially in the area of security, sometimes the numbers are staggering as to how many different products [security teams] are running to achieve their goals. We believe in integrated or built in, rather than bolt on, and that’s what we’re providing for our customers," Jeff Olson, director of SD-WAN product and technical marketing for HPE, told CRN.

The latest updates to the security portfolio aim to integrate security into the network, reducing the need for multiple products, the company said.

The new SASE copilot uses natural language queries to analyze network and security conditions to serve up actionable insight that IT professionals can use to investigate open ports, identify unpatched systems, pinpoint security gaps or monitor activity on the network, Olson said.

“Think of it as an assistant to help [security or networking administrators] do their job,” he said.

HPE’s open and flexible, cloud-native NAC that’s inside the flagship HPE Aruba Central platform now offers unified access control and support for third-party network devices.

“Partners can now work with their customers and help them define a global access policy that can be provided across heterogeneous networks. They don’t have to have an all-Juniper network or an all-HPE Aruba network. They can have a heterogeneous network, and this is all managed from Aruba Central,” Olson said.

The upgraded NAC offering can work across Cisco switches or any other networking device in a location or at a branch, he said. “This all builds on zero trust,” he added.

“We’re excited about this and we believe that partners are going to be excited too because it shows how [HPE and Juniper]—our two networking business units—are coming together and we’re coming together faster and we’ll be more potent together, than versus, say, a Cisco,” he said.

Having one NAC platform across all vendor environments is extremely relevant, said Mike Shishman, vice president of alliances and partners for Xalient, a global solution provider that specializes in networking and security that partners with HPE.

“We could use that as a managed service enabler, along with our own AIOps tool, Martina,” Shishman said.

HPE, said Shishman, is showing more commitment to security than it ever has with these latest additions to the portfolio, along with other announcements the vendor has made over the last year.

“I think the Juniper investment, as well as some of these SASE and NAC developments, is certainly making people look at HPE from a different lens,” he said.

The headline for HPE at Red Hat 2025 was that it was the first time post-Juniper acquisition that the company would be showcasing its combined security portfolio. Initially, the branding will be HPE Aruba Networking and HPE Juniper Networking, with its overarching networking business staying known as HPE Networking.

“It’s going to get simpler for everyone in terms of how we refer to ourselves … but we’ll need that distinction for a while because we have unique product lines, and those product lines aren’t going to go away anytime soon,” HPE’s Olson said. “But we’re excited about how they’re coming together, the synergies between our products and what we can do for our customers and our partners.”

On the security and disaster recovery front, HPE Zerto Software revealed at Black Hat that it will offer a new integration hub that will let third-party applications access HPE Zerto data. CrowdStrike is the first integration launch partner, according to Houston-based HPE.