Arista acquires VeloCloud from Broadcom and Todd Nightingale joins as president and COO

Arista Networks Inc. today announced it will acquire VeloCloud SD-WAN from Broadcom Inc., a deal that puts to bed ongoing reports that surfaced about six weeks ago.

The purchase, for which a price wasn’t given but was reportedly about $1 billion, gives Arista a best-in-class software-defined wide-area network solution to complement its current high-end 7000 series router which run the Cloud EOS operating system. VeloCloud has a wide range of cloud-managed SD-WAN offerings with integrated security enabling Arista to reach another tier of customer.

VeloCloud was one of the pioneers in SD-WAN and has found a wide range of use cases for its products that have traditional connectivity but also WiFi and 5G for WAN access. At previous MWCs, VeloCloud demonstrated how its SD-WAN was being used to connect emergency vehicles.

For Arista, VeloCloud fills a gap in its portfolio, enabling it to offer end-to-end networking solutions to a wider range of customers. The company was founded on offering high-end switching for data centers and high frequency trading. From there it expanded, added Wi-Fi with the acquisition of MoJo Networks and then added a line of campus switches

Its high-end routers are used by cloud providers, service providers and large enterprises but branch office connectivity was a gap. Now it adds one of the leading SD-WAN firms and can better compete when an end-to-end solution is required. Gartner Inc.’s last SD-WAN Magic Quadrant had VeloCloud as one of six leaders.

Also, VeloCloud beings integrated firewalls and other security features to add to Arista’s threat management, network detection and response, and network access control capabilities. Arista isn’t known as a security vendor but has quietly built a strong portfolio. Though it’s likely to not lead with security, it has a broad enough set of capabilities to address the emerging trend of integrating security in the network.

With respect to artificial intelligence, VeloCloud current offers VeloRAIN (Robust AI Networking) and VeloBrain. The former uses AI to improve the security and performance of distributed AI workloads (VeloCloud for AI). The latter, announced earlier this year, is an AI operator to help network engineers better manage their environments (AI for VeloCloud), addressing both sides of the AI coin. Arista was early out of the gates with networking for AI as its high-performance products are ideally suited for the rigors of AI. It also offers autonomous virtual assistant or AVA for AI operations.

The most obvious question with this acquisition is how Arista integrates VeloCloud with its products. One of the key differentiators for Arista has been that EOS is the single operating system that powers all its products. This has enabled everything to be managed through CloudVision and for the Arista DataLake to be the single source of data for AI operations.

Though I have not talked to the company about this, history shows that when it does make acquisitions, it eventually ports the products to EOS. However, VeloCloud is much bigger than MoJo, Awake, BigSwitch and other purchases and has a massive installed base, so the company will need to tread carefully here and ensure customer disruption is minimized. Arista tends to err on the side of caution when it comes to its customers, so my assumption is Arista will keep VeloCloud on its own operating systems and gracefully migrate over time.

For VeloCloud, this ends the long quixotic journey for a company that never quite fit inside the company that owned it. When VeloCloud became part of VMware, it was known as one of the leaders in SD-WAN.

However, then-CEO Pat Gelsinger was very aggressive in his tone of how with VeloCloud and Nicira would disrupt network engineers, which obviously wasn’t popular with the audience of people buying the products. VMware dropped the VeloCloud branding and, despite having some of the best technology in SD-WAN, that opened the doors for competitors to start taking share. Eventually, VMware brought back the branding of “VeloCloud by VMware,” which had better appeal to networkers, removing a big barrier in the sales process.

When the Broadcom acquisition took place and the strategy was to go all-in on VMware Cloud Foundation, it became obvious VeloCloud would need to find a new home. At MWC25, the booth was branded VeloCloud by Broadcom, but in my conversations with executives it seemed that was temporary, although removing the VMware association did seem to help with the brand.

With Arista, VeloCloud finds itself with a company that has one motivation, and that’s to make the best-performing networking products. That’s a win for VeloCloud but more importantly its customers.

This adds to a busy week for Arista. The Gartner Magic Quadrant for Wired/Wireless LAN dropped, and the company was rated the highest in ability to execute for companies in the Visionaries Quadrant. Adding to its current portfolio of products, Arista this week announced the following new products:

• The 710XP, a compact, fanless 12-port PoE switch that is also 60-watt capable designed for remote office and branch office deployments.
• The O-435, a ruggedized outdoor Wi-Fi 7 access point built for industrial and outdoor environments.
• The C-400, an entry-level 2×2 tri-radio Wi-Fi 7 indoor access point aimed at cost-effective, high-volume service provider-managed branch environments, including small and medium-sized businesses, multi-dwelling units and small remote offices.

One final piece of news: Todd Nightingale (pictured) has joined Arista as president and chief operating 0fficer. Nightingale most recently served as chief executive of Fastly Inc., but prior to that he was executive vice president and general manager of Cisco Systems Inc.’s Enterprise Networking and Cloud division.

Nightingale joins a stacked Arista leadership team that includes Ken Duda, Mark Foss, John McCool and, of course, CEO Jayshree Ullal. Nightingale’s experience at Meraki, one of the early cloud networking vendors focused on ease of use, will be invaluable to Arista as it looks to broaden its appeal to a wider range of customers.

Zeus Kerravala is a principal analyst at ZK Research, a division of Kerravala Consulting. He wrote this article for SiliconANGLE.

Photo: SiliconANGLE

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