Jayshree Ullal on what's up at Arista Networks in India

By Nandita Singh

Software-driven cloud networking solutions company, Arista Networks, opened its first India office in 2010 and has maintained steady growth since then. This week, Arista opened its new technology centre at Bengaluru. The centre is focused on the development of Arista EOS (Extensible Operating System) software driven products and technologies. Jayshree Ullal, President and CEO for Arista Networks elaborates some more on how Arsita is addressing the India market opportunities: Excerpts:

How big is your team and what kind of work will come out of the new Innovation Center at Bengaluru?

The new technology centre, will focus on the development of Arista EOS (Extensible Operating System) software driven products and technologies. We do not get specific on numbers but Asia is the second largest engineering centre and has grown from single digits to triple digits on headcount in five years.

What markets Arista is serving in networking?

Our customers continue to be across four key verticals: Cloud Titans, financial, high-tech enterprises, web and service providers. Arista continues to focus on the developed countries in APJ. ASEAN, Japan, Australia, Korea and, of course, India.

What is your customer base and what major pain points you resolve for your customers?

Our customers are the IT teams under pressure to respond to cloud applications quicker than ever. The daily drumbeat for new technology adoption is in conflict with the ongoing goal of accountability for risk and operational cost reduction. A balanced and thoughtful architecture is essential. This is a top priority, particularly at the CIO and board level, as IT is no longer viewed as a cost center but as a productivity center. The three pain points we resolve are: Reuse, Refresh, Re-architect.

What would classify as innovation in today’s networking market?

There’s tremendous innovation in cloud. There is:

• Scale for universal spine
• A new programmable software stack (EOS)
• New types of availability and resilience and hitless upgrades
• Automation of workloads
• Workflow telemetry
• Marco-segmentation Security

Arista is the only cloud networking company that builds a highly extensible network for workflow workloads and workstreams. We are at the center of this new cloud disruption, unshackling the defensive and expensive silos of legacy enterprise networking.

Where do you think India market is on the SDN adoption curve?

SDN is not one technology or magic pill to cure the network. It's about use cases. Examples include:

• IP storage
• Big data analytics
• Network roll back
• Zero touch provisioning
• App monitoring
• Network virtualization

SDN protocols and programmability is well underway with Arista EOS and CloudVision, a network wide approach for workload orchestration and workflow automation, announced earlier this year. A key use case in this is Network Wide roll back and automation. It is kind of time machine for networks.

How closely do you think IoT is linked with SDN at this point of time?

SDN has some WAN use cases and we are also seeing the need for building devices to become more programmable such as home lighting. This automation necessitates a universal spine fabric from Arista to connect all the many leafs.

Also Read: Amod Dani to lead the new Innovation Centre in Bengaluru