Analysis
Rami Rahim, who became president of HPE's networking business after running Juniper Networks, told The Register that AI-driven network operations will handle all trouble tickets without human involvement within two to three years. He estimates 70 to 80 percent of tickets already need no human intervention today, and expects even hardware swaps to be automated -- a replacement part arriving by mail with an intern doing the physical install.
Rahim's framing leans on consumer analogies: automatic transmissions, cruise control, lane assist and self-driving taxis all earned trust gradually, one automated feature at a time, and he expects network administrators to adopt AIOps the same way, starting with something as low-risk as auto-rebooting a switch port. His preferred success metric is blunt -- the volume and resolution speed of "the Wi-Fi sucks" complaints, which he says make up most enterprise tickets regardless of the actual root cause.
“HPE markets the resulting pitch as "self-driving networks," layered into its broader hybrid-cloud portfolio alongside OpsRamp, its observability platform.”
HPE closed its roughly $14 billion acquisition of Juniper in July 2025, and Rahim says the company unified management of Aruba- and Juniper-origin Wi-Fi access points under either vendor's tools in under 18 months -- a real integration milestone, which he contrasted with how long Cisco and Meraki have historically taken to do the same across their own product lines. HPE markets the resulting pitch as "self-driving networks," layered into its broader hybrid-cloud portfolio alongside OpsRamp, its observability platform.
The bigger claim underneath the ticket-automation prediction is that enterprises will soon run far more AI agents than human employees, and that scale is itself a networking problem as much as a compute one -- more agents means more east-west traffic, more failure points, and more need for automated remediation that doesn't wait on a human queue. That's a real thesis for infrastructure investors, but it's also exactly the kind of claim a networking vendor just finishing a $14 billion acquisition has every incentive to make sound inevitable. The Register's own framing flags the obvious conflict: Rahim is promoting the product he now runs, and "no issues that require humans" is the kind of promise the networking industry has made before without fully delivering on it.
