HPE Networking President Rami Rahim says the Partner Day One integration into a single Partner Ready Vantage program as of Nov. 1 creates a “significant cross-selling opportunity” as HPE brings the combined networking portfolio to a “much broader set of sellers and customers.”
HPE Networking President Rami Rahim Wednesday told analysts that HPE is raising the bar on the “channel opportunity” with “Partner Day One,” the Nov. 1 formal integration of the Juniper Networks and HPE partner programs, along with an ambitious modern new integrated quoting and ordering system.
“We have two major integration priorities remaining: bringing our partner ecosystems together and completing our commercial systems integration,” said Rahim. “The key milestone for the first one is called Partner Day One. Partners drive most of our networking business and this milestone will enable all 60,000 HPE partners to sell the full networking portfolio through one unified partner program.”
Before the acquisition, only about 10 percent of HPE Aruba and Juniper Networking partners “overlapped,” selling both networking product sets, said Rahim.
The “Partner Day One’ integration into a single Partner Ready Vantage program as of Nov. 1 creates a “significant cross-selling opportunity” as HPE brings the combined networking portfolio to a “much broader set of sellers and customers,” said Rahim.
Rahim said HPE is determined to make it “absolutely frictionless” for all 60,000 HPE partners to sell the broad portfolio, both campus and branch and HPE data center networking.
“We want to grow from what is an AIOps amazing self-driving experience in campus and branch into the data center,” he said. “We can absolutely do it! We’ve already seen elements of that.”
Rahim said he expects Partner Day One to increase the “cross-sell” win rate. “It’s still very low right now and it is only going to go up,” he said.
HPE is also seeing cross-selling opportunities with all the HPE sales teams including server and storage now selling the full networking portfolio. “We have trained all our sellers to sell the broad portfolio,” said Rahim. “We have metrics. We are measuring the performance. We are starting to see good early signs, but that’s a huge opportunity going forward.”
Rahim said “equally important” as Partner Day One is the work being done to move to single “lead-to-cash” processes and systems for the combined HPE Networking business.
“We’re building a modern single quote-to-cash foundation that will make it easier for customers and partners to do business with us, while allowing us to launch new product and operate more efficiently,” he said. “The first phase launches in November with integrated quoting and ordering. We expect to unify our supply chain processes by the end of 2027 with continued improvements coming throughout 2028.”
As for “cost synergies,” HPE is raising its run rate cost savings synergies for the $13.4 billion Juniper Networks acquisition, which was completed in July 2025, from $600 million when the deal closed to $800 million for fiscal 2028. “Those savings come from several areas, which include things like SG&A (Selling, General and Administrative expenses), go-to-market harmonization and the elimination of R&D duplicate costs,” he said. “We are running ahead of our cost synergy plan while also spending less on integration through fiscal discipline.”
Patrick Shelley, CTO at PKA Technologies, a Montvale, N.J.-based top HPE partner, said the combining of the two partner programs and integrated quoting and ordering are two more milestones that illustrate just how quickly HPE is progressing in the HPE-Juniper Networks integration.
“This just shows how fast HPE is moving to bring the two businesses together into a single, cohesive networking business,” he said. “The fact that you will be able to go to a single place to quote and order for a combined Aruba and Juniper solution saves considerable amount of time and effort and increases the profitability of the deal for partners.”
Shelley said he is also heartened that HPE is gaining more cost synergies than anticipated given the highly competitive networking market. “It’s important for HPE to be extremely efficient here given they are competing against Cisco and Arista,” he said.
As for selling the full combined HPE-Juniper networking portfolio, PKA is already well down that path given that it got certified as a Juniper partner even before HPE completed the acquisition in July 2025.
PKA expects its HPE networking business to double this year with the momentum behind the combined HPE-Juniper networking portfolio.
“We are seeing a lot of excitement from customers about the HPE-Juniper acquisition,” said Shelley. “Almost every customer is looking at HPE-Juniper as something they need to and should be looking at as an alternative to legacy networking environments.”
Shelley noted that HPE was recently positioned as a Leader in the top-right portion of Gartner’s Magic Quadrant for Enterprise Wired and Wireless LAN Infrastructure. “That’s helping drive conversations too,” he said.
Shelley said HPE is driving Juniper Mist AI networking innovation at a breakneck pace, which is also capturing the attention of customers. “HPE has done a great job of putting these two companies together into a best of breed offering,” he said.
Dan Schwab, co-president of D&H Distributing, an HPE-Juniper networking distributor, said the company is “bullish” on HPE growth for the next few years and expects the networking business to be a “key driver” in addition to compute.
“The AI and data center buildout market is driving an insatiable demand for infrastructure, which creates opportunities for the entire channel,” he said.
