Arista Networks is famous for providing cognitive cloud networking solutions for large data centers, high-performance computing centers, and high-frequency trading environments. The company is based in Santa Clara, California and it offers a wide range of products and solutions from cloud networking to telemetry and analytics. Andy Bechtolsheim, David Cheriton, and Kenneth Duda co-founded Arista Networks in 2004. The founders came from a background with rich experience in semiconductor and hardware design.
Introduction to Arista Networks
Arista Networks provides a highly efficient networking solution to big data centers as the products include an array of Ethernet speeds from 10 to 400 gigabits per second. The platform of Arista is also made highly secure with CloudVision and Arista EOS (Linux-based network operating system) which is installed in all Arista products. Apart from the highly experienced co-founders of Arista, the current President and CEO of the company is Jayshree Ullal who also has a luminous career history. Arista is very famous around the world for picking up a team of intellectuals who have a rich professional history thus operated by a team of visionaries. The company went public in 2014 and is listed as ANET in NYSE.
Founding History of Arista Networks
As mentioned earlier, all the founders are from an industrial background as they were associated with large enterprises before co-founding Arista Networks. Andy Bechtolsheim co-founded Sun Microsystems back in 1982 and he served as the chief hardware designer of the company. Andy, along with David, co-founded a new company called Granite Systems in 1995 where they started developing Gigabit Ethernet products. After a year, the company was acquired by Cisco Systems. After a few years, Andy and David again opened up a new start-up called Kealia but again it was acquired by Sun Microsystems.
After this acquisition, David and Andy worked at Cisco in executive positions and along with Kennetth Duda. Kennetth Duda was the first employee of Granite Systems and that’s how he met the other two co-founders. They successfully developed a product line for the Cisco company called Catalyst and decided to establish their own company in 2004 which is currently known as Arista Networks. Jayshree Ullal, the current CEO of the company is also an ex-employee of Cisco who worked there for fifteen years. From 2014, there have been several differences followed by filing lawsuits between Cisco and Arista and the latter agreed to $400 million as a part of the settlement.
Customers and Acquisitions
Arista’s customers mainly include big enterprises around the globe that require highly efficient and fast networking platforms. Currently, Arista has many big customers who are in the list of Fortune 500 companies. Arista delivers its products across the data centers and campus with routing and software solutions in order to monitor and be responsive globally. There are around 7,000 customers worldwide served by Arista Networks on a daily basis.
Arista Networks have acquired quite a few companies in the last few years. It’s latest acquisition is Awake Security which is a network detection and response platform that uses AI to prevent both internal and external threats. Along with Awake Security, the company also acquired Big Switch Networks last year. This acquisition led to the availability of DANZ Monitoring Fabric, a network observability software across all switching networks of Arista. In 2018, the company acquired Mojo Networks which provides Arista with Wifi solutions for networks across campus and enterprise. Arista also acquired Metamako in 2018 which augments Arista’s low latency platforms.
The Founders of Arista Networks
Andy Bechtolsheim is currently serving as the Chairman and the Chief Development Officer of Arista Networks. Previously, he worked at Sun Microsystems where he was in charge of next generation server, storage, and network architectures. Andy is a computer engineer who went to Carnegie Mellon University and received his doctorate from Stanford University. He is a member of the National Academy of Engineering.
After co-founding Arista Networks, David Cheriton co-founded a couple of more companies like Apstra Inc and BrainofT Inc. He received his bachelor’s degree from University of British Columbia and his masters and doctorate from the University of Waterloo. Currently, he is a computer science professor at Stanford University.
Kenneth Duda is the Chief Technology Officer and Senior Vice President, Software Engineering at Arista Networks. He also worked as the CTO of There.com where he built a real-time 3D distributed system. Kenneth went to MIT where he graduated in three different engineering courses.
Annasha Dey is an NIT student, who apart from studying engineering is also a content writer. She has a great interest in photography, writing, reading novels, and travelling as well. She is a foodie who loves socializing and hanging out with her friends. She is also a trained Kathak dancer and a big fashion enthusiast. Dey also loves watching TV series, which includes F.R.I.E.N.D.S. and Big Bang Theory. To be a better writer she prefers to read more