Arista Networks, Inc.

What does Arista Networks do?

Arista designs and sells high-performance Ethernet switches and the EOS operating system that runs them. Its products connect data center servers, enterprise campuses, and the GPU clusters used for AI training and inference.

Is Arista publicly traded?

Yes. Arista trades on the New York Stock Exchange under the ticker ANET and became an S&P 100 component in September 2026. It has been public since June 2014.

Who founded Arista Networks?

Andy Bechtolsheim, David Cheriton, and Kenneth Duda founded the company in 2004 in Santa Clara. Bechtolsheim, a Sun Microsystems co-founder and Google's first investor, remains chief development officer and the largest individual shareholder.

Who is the CEO of Arista?

Jayshree Ullal has been CEO since 2008 and chairperson since 2022. A former Cisco senior vice president, she is widely credited with building Arista into the leading cloud Ethernet vendor.

How big is Arista?

Q3 2026 revenue was $3.66 billion, up 58.5% year over year, with roughly 4,000 employees. GAAP net income for the quarter reached $1.56 billion.

What is EOS?

EOS, the Extensible Operating System, is Arista's single network operating system. Built on a publish-subscribe state database, it runs across all Arista products and is the architectural foundation of the company's engineering advantage.

Bechtolsheim, Cheriton, and Duda founded Arastra in 2004. Bechtolsheim brought a singular pedigree: Sun Microsystems co-founder, builder of Cisco's early high-end switches through Granite Systems, and the first investor in Google. The trio believed the incumbent network operating systems had become unmaintainable, and that a fresh architecture could compound.

EOS shipped as a Linux-based, state-oriented OS where all system state lived in a publish-subscribe database called SysDB. That design let Arista add features without the spaghetti coupling that plagued IOS and its successors, and it remains the technical core two decades later.

Microsoft became the anchor lighthouse account around 2011, then Meta at hyperscale, validating Arista's model of pairing EOS with Broadcom merchant silicon. The June 2014 IPO at $43 per share established it as Cisco's most credible challenger.

Cisco answered with litigation, filing patent and copyright claims over EOS's command-line interface. Arista fought publicly for four years; workarounds, court rulings, and a 2018 settlement resolved the conflict largely in its favor.

Jayshree Ullal, who left a senior Cisco role to become CEO in 2008, built the company's go-to-market around engineering credibility. The 2020s brought campus expansion, the VeloCloud SD-WAN acquisition, and then the AI wave: Etherlink Ethernet fabrics for GPU clusters positioned Arista as the open-standards alternative to Nvidia InfiniBand.

The AI supercycle rewrote the company's scale. Quarterly revenue went from $2.31 billion in Q3 2025 to $3.66 billion in Q3 2026, up 58.5%, with more than 100 Etherlink customers and a forecast of 10-plus gigawatts of AI network deployments by end of 2027. The S&P 100 added Arista in September 2026.

Arista joined the S&P 100 in September 2026 and has held Gartner Magic Quadrant leader status in data center networking for years. Its products regularly win industry awards for AI infrastructure, and CEO Jayshree Ullal has been named to Barron's Top CEOs and Fortune's Most Powerful Women lists. The company's engineering culture is itself a cited benchmark in networking circles.

The defining controversy was Cisco's multi-year patent and copyright campaign beginning in 2014, which alleged EOS borrowed proprietary command-line conventions. An ITC import ruling briefly pressured the supply chain, but engineering workarounds and subsequent rulings and settlement resolved the matter largely in Arista's favor by 2018.

Since then the public record is clean. Investor scrutiny focuses on customer concentration and the capital intensity of the AI buildout rather than legal or regulatory exposure.