Ex-Cisco Executives defect for upstart competitor Arista Networks
This morning cloud networking equipment startup Arista Networks has announced that it has lured two high-ranking Executives away from industry giant Cisco Systems. These two aren’t every day rank-and-file Vice Presidents, rather some of the most talented Silicon Valley innovators that will help poise Arista Networks for serious growth.
In 2004, Andy Bechtolsheim started the company after leaving Cisco Systems to found the data center switch company, then called Arastra. Bechtolsheim is best known as one of the founders of Sun Microsystems, but is also a serial entrepreneur that has sold two other companies to Sun and Cisco so far in his career. Now he will lead Arista as the Chairman and Chief Development Officer.
Also announced this morning is the joining of Jayshree Ullal, formerly the head of Cisco’s Datacenter, Switching and Services Group. Ullal was dubbed one of the “50 Most Powerful People” by Network World in 2005 and she will be joining the switch maker as the President and CEO.
Arista Networks makes networking switching equipment designed specifically to handle the rising demand for data due to cloud computing. Switches are fast becoming a bottleneck in large networks that process massive amounts of data.
In designing equipment to handle demands for such high data throughput, Arista has also coined a new term to describe these operating environments: cloud networking. For years data moving between the major network service providers has been referred to as within the cloud, but Arista is the first to coin the term to describe its networking gear.
Arista began shipping 10 gigabit networking equipment quietly this past May to a select few customers. Among its clients are BitGravity, a large-scale content distribution network, and Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory. There’s no doubt that these high-ranking defections will start bringing in new business in short order.
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