Arista Networks, Inc. (Arista) is an industry leader in data-driven, client-to-cloud networking for large AI, data center, campus, and routing environments. Arista’s platforms deliver availability, agility, automation, analytics, and security through an advanced network operating stack.
At the core of Arista’s platform is Arista’s Extensible Operating System (EOS), a modernized publish-subscribe state-sharing networking operating system. Arista EOS, combined with a set of network applications a...
Arista Networks, Inc. (Arista) is an industry leader in data-driven, client-to-cloud networking for large AI, data center, campus, and routing environments. Arista’s platforms deliver availability, agility, automation, analytics, and security through an advanced network operating stack.
At the core of Arista’s platform is Arista’s Extensible Operating System (EOS), a modernized publish-subscribe state-sharing networking operating system. Arista EOS, combined with a set of network applications and its Ethernet switching and routing platforms using best of breed merchant silicon, provides customers with a highly competitive and diversified portfolio of products with improved price/performance and time to market.
The company’s portfolio of products, services, and technologies are grouped into the following categories: Core (Data Center, Cloud and AI Networking), Cognitive Adjacencies (Campus and Routing), and Cognitive Network (Software and Services). The company’s customers include companies of all sizes and span a range of industries and geographies and are grouped into the following categories: Cloud and AI Titans, Enterprise, and Providers.
Market Opportunity
The company sells its products through both a direct sales force and channel partners, competing primarily in the high-speed data center Ethernet switching markets for 10 Gigabit Ethernet (GbE) and above, including the Cloud and AI Ethernet switching markets, Enterprise Data Center switching/routing market, the cloud-grade and enterprise routing markets, and the campus wired and wireless markets. The company also participates in the Network Monitoring, Network Detection and Response (NDR), and Network Access Control security markets through both acquisition and organic development.
Customers
The company’s customers include large cloud customers or Cloud and AI Titans, other internet and service providers, including specialty and AI Neoclouds, and a wide breadth of enterprise customers, including financial services organizations and government agencies. The company continues to diversify the types of enterprise customers it sells to and has continued to expand its presence across a wide spectrum of industries, including media and entertainment, healthcare, oil and gas, education, manufacturing, industrial, and more. Meta Platforms and Microsoft, two of the company’s Cloud and AI Titan end customers, each accounted for more than 10% of its total revenue for the year ended December 31, 2024.
Market Drivers
Digital Transformation
The company’s comprehensive R-series, X-series and Etherlink switching and routing portfolios running the highly programmable EOS, transform networks with simplified and scalable architectures across multiple use-cases.
Artificial Intelligence (AI)
Arista's AI strategy is based on achieving two key objectives. Arista provides network switching products intended to provide a robust interconnect that seamlessly links GPUs, compute and storage to deliver fast job completion time for training and generative AI workloads. Arista also offers customers the Arista Autonomous Virtual Assist (‘AVATM’) which uses natural processing language to provide AI-assisted outcomes for network operations, security and observability.
As a proud founding member, Arista is committed to leading the Ultra Ethernet Consortium (‘UEC’) to achieve scalable and efficient remote memory access, implemented with enhanced packet spraying, flexible ordering, and modern congestion control algorithms.
Hybrid Work
Arista’s campus portfolio was driven by customers desiring the same quality and operational efficiency available from EOS and CloudVision throughout their entire enterprise network. The company entered the campus market with a diverse portfolio of modular and fixed form factor Campus spine switches, Power-over-Ethernet (‘PoE’) leaf switches based on EOS and Wi-Fi access points managed through CloudVision. The company continue to expand the company’s campus portfolio to offer the advantages of EOS across the entire enterprise network. Most recently, the company have added incremental Enterprise WAN products as well as embedded NDR security sensors into the company’s campus switches to address more of the security challenges that face campus administrators.
Zero Trust Networking Security
Arista offers a full suite of security solutions built on the foundations of the company’s unified operating system in EOS and the common management plane in CloudVision. These solutions map to the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency’s Zero Trust Maturity Model and help organizations accelerate their journey toward optimal zero trust maturity. Moreover, these network security controls can help compensate for gaps in the organization’s zero trust posture in domains, such as identity, devices, workload, and data.
Data-Driven Cloud Networking Solutions
The core of the company’s cloud networking platform is its data-driven operating system, EOS, which runs on top of standard Linux and offers programmability at all layers of the stack. System state and data are stored in EOS and maintained in a highly efficient, centralized system database where data is accessed via an automated publish/subscribe model. This distinct design principle provides module independence, self-healing resiliency, and multi-process software stability. EOS is packaged as a perpetual license on Arista hardware platforms, virtualized EOS (vEOS) and CloudEOS for production or simulations use cases with flexible platform support, including third-party hardware.
The company’s cloud networking innovations started with pioneering Arista EOS, which provides switching, routing, state-streaming, and telemetry functions across all Arista platforms.
The Arista EOS network stack architecture provides a foundation for consolidation of streamed device state, telemetry, packet, flow, alert, sensor, and third-party data into an aggregated Network Data Lake (Arista NetDL). Arista NetDL consolidates diverse datasets required for effectively applying AI/Machine Learning (ML) methods by Arista AVA for Network Operations (NetOps) and Security Operations (SecOps) use cases. NetDL also presents a single application programming interface (API) surface for access to network and network-related data for enhancing Arista and third-party applications.
Cognitive Campus Solutions
Arista’s Cognitive Campus is based on a data driven architecture and offers consistent, unified management across the campus edge for wired and wireless networks, as well as integrated security & proactive network assurance. The company’s Cognitive Campus networking solutions are based on three pillars:
Universal Networking - Customers want a network that minimizes planned and unplanned downtime. Arista delivers that through capabilities, such as smart software upgrades that can update a switch to a new version of code without taking an outage. Moreover, Arista’s standards-based offerings minimize the learning curve for operators both in the wired and the wireless space.
Zero Touch Operations - Arista’s solutions are designed from the ground up for real-time telemetry, automation, and AI for networking based on its unified network data lake architecture. As a result, customers can achieve faster deployment to new locations and lower their cost of network operations.
Zero Trust Network - Arista delivers a combination of capabilities that help customers secure their campus networks, from controlling who can get on the network via network access control (CloudVision AGNI) to detecting threats using network detection and response (Arista NDR) or wireless intrusion prevention. Arista also provides identity-based micro segmentation (Arista MSS) to ensure the zero trust posture extends to every critical asset within the organization.
Products and Services
The company’s portfolio of products and services are grouped into the following three categories:
Core Data center/Cloud/AI
Arista offers one of the broadest product portfolios of data-driven, high-speed, cloud and data center Ethernet switches. Built on top of the superior quality and openness of Arista EOS, the company delivers high performance, industry-leading capacity, ultra-low latency, rich features, and powerful efficient solutions to meet its customers’ demand for capacity and network speeds for both front-end and back-end storage, compute and AI zones. The company’s core switching portfolio contains both fixed and modular form factors, varying port configurations and densities, and options in power delivery all driven by customer requirements.
The Arista Etherlink AI portfolio of 800G switches, coupled with Arista's EOS innovations, such as AI Analyzer along with optimal load balancing solutions, offer compelling solutions for contemporary AI applications and deployment. Arista also continues to be innovative in such areas as deep packet buffer architectures, virtual output queuing, non-disruptive upgrades, embedded optics and next-generation optics, reversible cooling and overall system power efficiency. The Arista 7800R AI Spine, 7060 AI Leaf and the Distributed Etherlink Switch (DES) are designed to address the demanding scale and performance requirements driven by large-scale AI networks. Arista also provides solutions for compute, GPU and storage interconnects in driving AI/ML workloads, leveraging its IP/Ethernet switches to deliver unparalleled performance and scalability.
The Arista 7700R4 DES is an ultra-scalable, intelligent distributed system engineered to meet the rigorous demands of large-scale AI and machine learning (ML) environments. Building upon the foundations of the 7800R4 series, the 7700R4 DES delivers strong performance and scalability for accelerated computing. The Arista 7700R4 represents a significant advancement in networking technology, offering a robust and scalable solution tailored for the most demanding AI and ML workloads. Its combination of high throughput, deterministic performance, and advanced congestion management makes it an ideal choice for organizations aiming to build or expand their AI infrastructure.
AI workloads require optimized performance and availability at all times, to minimize job completion time and thus maximize utilization of expensive XPU accelerators. The EOS-based AI Agent can reside either directly on a SmartNIC or on a server CPU, to provide local configuration management of NICs along with streaming telemetry of NIC performance fed to directly-attached Arista EOS-based switches. This ensures the QoS parameters for AI optimization are consistently applied from the NIC to the network alike, to avoid misconfigurations which might cause performance bottlenecks without an easy-to-diagnose root cause. And with telemetry data spanning the AI NICs and the AI networking platforms, the network operations team can have comprehensive visibility into the entire traffic path with immediate insight into performance and problems.
Cognitive Adjacencies
Cognitive Campus Switching - Arista’s Cognitive Campus switching products, powered by EOS, offer consistent, unified management across the campus edge for wired and wireless networks, as well as integrated security & proactive network assurance. The company’s campus products include the Arista 7300 Series spine/Spline, 720/750 Series POE switches, and a broad range of indoor and outdoor Cognitive Wi-Fi Access Points.
Cloud-Grade Routing - Arista’s Cloud-Grade Routing platforms, powered by EOS, combine high performance routing, high port density, deep buffers, integrated DWDM and wire speed encryption. The company’s 7280R3 Universal Leaf and 7500R3 and 7800R3 Universal Spine platforms serve a variety of use cases, including high speed multi-cloud connect, Data Center Interconnect (DCI), controller-based traffic engineering, peering, business VPNs, core routing and Secure Enterprise edge routing.
WAN Routing - The Arista AWE-7200R Series of WAN Routing System, purpose built by Arista and powered by Arista EOS, offers high performance and scale to meet enterprise modern WAN edge and aggregation requirements. The company’s Arista AWE-7200R Series sets the standard for aggregation and critical site interconnect by supporting 1/10/100GbE interfaces and flexible network modules. It delivers from 1Gb to over 50Gb of bidirectional AES256 encrypted traffic with high VRF and tunnel scale.
Networking Software and Services
The company’s software and services are based on subscription-based models and include the following offerings:
CloudVision - CloudVision is Arista’s modern, multi-domain management platform that leverages cloud networking principles to deliver a simplified end-to-end network operations experience for the company’s Enterprise market. Unlike traditional domain-specific management solutions, CloudVision enables consistent zero touch network operations across data center, campus wired and wireless, routing interconnect and multi-cloud networks helping to break down the complexity of siloed management approaches.
CloudVision is built on Arista’s NetDL architecture and leverages real-time network state to provide an abstraction of the physical network to a broader, network-wide perspective allowing for a more efficient approach for several operational and network telemetry capabilities.
Arista A-Care Services - The company has designed its customer support offerings, Arista A-Care Services, to provide its customers with high levels of support. The company’s global team of support engineers engages directly with client IT teams and is always available over e-mail, by phone or through its website.
The company offers multiple service options that allow its customers to select the product replacement service level that best meets their needs. The company stocks spare parts in over 200 locations around the world through its third-party logistics suppliers. All the company’s service options include unlimited access to bug-fixes, new-feature-releases, online case management and its community forums.
DANZ Monitoring Fabric (DMF) - DANZ Monitoring Fabric (DMF) is a next-generation network packet broker (NPB) architected for pervasive, organization-wide visibility and security, delivering multi-tenant monitoring-as-a-service. Leveraging Arista's high-performance and versatile Ethernet switch platforms with DMF, IT operators can pervasively monitor all user, device/IoT and application traffic (north-south and east-west) by gaining complete visibility into physical, virtual and container environments. Deep hop-by-hop visibility, predictive analytics, contextual insights and scale-out packet capture, integrated through a single dashboard, enables simplified network performance monitoring (NPM) and SecMon workflows for real-time and historical context across production data centers, enterprise campus/branch and 4G/5G mobile networks.
Arista Guardian Network Identity (AGNI) - To overcome the new security challenges and the explosion of clients in today’s perimeter-less enterprise networks, Arista delivers a novel AI-driven network Identity service, Arista Guardian for Network Identity (AGNI) to connect the network, users, and devices across remote and geographically dispersed locations. Based on Arista’s flagship CloudVision, the new AGNI platform brings scale, simplicity, and security across users, their associated endpoints, and IoT devices. AGNI integrates with Arista NDR and other third-party XDR and EDR solutions for post-admission control functionality.
Arista's AI-driven Network Detection and Response (NDR) - An AI-driven Security Platform, powered by AVATM, Arista NDR analyzes billions of network communications to autonomously discover, profile and classify every device, user, and application across perimeter, core, IoT, and cloud networks. Based on this deep understanding of the attack surface, the platform then detects threats to and from these entities, while providing the context necessary to respond rapidly.
CloudEOS - CloudEOS is Arista’s multi-cloud and cloud-native networking solution supporting autonomic operation to deliver an enterprise-class, highly secure, and reliable networking experience for any cloud. As part of the Arista EOS and CloudVision product family, it delivers consistent segmentation, automation, telemetry, provisioning and troubleshooting for the enterprise edge, WAN, campus, data center and multiple public and private clouds. To provide a scalable and automated network experience, CloudEOS integrates with Arista CloudVision to simplify the operator's experience of interconnecting and managing multi-cloud, cloud-native and on-premises enterprise networks.
CloudEOS is designed for consumption on Amazon AWS, Microsoft Azure, and Google public clouds via their marketplace and service catalogs.
Sales and Marketing
The company markets and sells its products through its direct sales force and in partnership with its channel partners, including distributors, value-added resellers, systems integrators and original equipment manufacturer (OEM) partners. The company also sells in conjunction with various technology partners. To facilitate channel coordination and increase productivity, the company has created a partner program, the Arista Partner Program, to engage partners who provide value-added services and extend its reach into the marketplace. Authorized training partners perform technical training of its channel partners and end customers.
The company’s sales organization is supported by systems engineers with deep technical expertise and responsibility for pre-sales technical support and solutions engineering for its customers, systems integrators, OEMs, and channel partners. In general, the personnel in its sales organization are formed into teams, and each team is responsible for a geographical territory, has responsibility for a number of major direct end-customer accounts or has assigned accounts in a specific vertical market. A pool of shared channel sales and marketing representatives also supports these teams.
The company’s marketing activities primarily consist of technology conferences, webinars, web marketing, trade shows, product demonstrations, seminars and events, public relations, analyst relations, demand generation and direct marketing to build its brand, increase end-customer awareness, communicate its product advantages and generate qualified leads for its field sales force and channel partners.
Seasonality
The company operates on a December 31st year end and typically has lower sequential quarter over quarter revenue growth in the first quarter of each fiscal year, often followed by stronger sequential revenue growth in the ensuring quarters.
Manufacturing
The company subcontracts the manufacturing of the majority of its products to various contract manufacturers. The company’s primary manufacturing partners are Jabil Inc., Sanmina Corporation, Flex Ltd., and Foxconn Hon Hai. These partners manufacture the company’s products internationally in Malaysia, Vietnam, Mexico, and other countries. The company require all its manufacturing locations to be ISO-9001 certified.
The company has four direct fulfillment facilities worldwide to hold finished goods inventory and perform final product configuration and shipping to customers and partners. After distribution, its products are installed by the customers or by third-party service providers such as system integrators or value-added resellers on their behalf.
In particular, the company is primarily reliant upon its predominant merchant silicon vendor, Broadcom, for its switching chips. The company’s product development efforts also depend upon continued collaboration with its key suppliers, such as Broadcom.
Competition
In the NDR market, the company’s Arista NDR offerings compete with other network security vendors, including Cisco, Darktrace, and ExtraHop. In the network packet broker (NPB) market, Arista DANZ Monitoring Fabric (DMF) competes with Cisco, Gigamon, Keysight, Netscout, and other network monitoring software providers.
Intellectual Property
The company owns a number of trademarks in the U.S. and other jurisdictions, and Arista, EOS, and CloudVision are among its core trademarks.
History
The company was founded in 2004. It was incorporated in 2004 in the state of California under the name Arastra, Inc. In March 2008, the company was reincorporated in the state of Nevada and in October 2008 changed its name to Arista Networks, Inc. The company was reincorporated in the state of Delaware in 2014.
