[snuxoll]

My employer used to have some HP switches in one of our campus offices when we were smaller, all of that gear has, to my knowledge, been pulled out and replaced with Cisco gear over the last 6 or so years. I really wouldn't call them "strong" by any means, the SMB niche they historically filled is filled with vendors competing for smaller business networks (< 5-10K sqft offices that need some fairly basic managed switches, their IT gear can probably fit in less than 24U of rack space.) Cisco SMB, Dell Force10, Netgear, Chinese brands like TP-Link, and HP's Aruba line all handle these deployments without much issue; meanwhile, large enterprise and carrier-grade deployments are almost entirely Cisco, Juniper, Arista, and some specialized players like Nokia, despite HPE's best efforts to enter this space.

I trust HP/HPE as far as I can throw them to not botch another acquisition, because regardless of any talent they have (or acquire), their management repeatedly manages to torpedo it. Out of any large player in the networking space, Juniper's gear is such a breath of fresh air because of their long-term focus on software, JunOS and supporting products are what sells their hardware instead of the other way around, so here's hoping they don't find a way to fuck it up (don't hold your breath).