Late Breaking: Cisco Switches to Arista
The legal feud between Cisco and Arista may finally be over, though perhaps not in the way any of us had expected.
The news starting to filter out of San Jose this morning is that Cisco has agreed to drop its lawsuit in return for the immediate acquisition of Arista Networks’ assets, intellectual property and employees. After the ITC’s initial determination last month that Arista had infringed on three out of five patents listed in the suit, it is understood that this solution was urgently brokered to protect the company’s employees from the potential fallout should the ITC’s next ruling be less than favorable.
Sources close to Cisco CEO Chuck Robbins are saying that Cisco plans to rebrand Arista’s impressive 7500 switch hardware as the new flagship Cisco Nexus 8000 series. With its reassuringly familiar command line interface, Arista’s EOS should be a seamless addition to Cisco’s impressive existing portfolio of network operating systems (i.e. IOS, Native IOS, IOS-XR, IOS-XRv, IOS-XE and NXOS) and customers will likely be lining up to deploy the impressive new Nexus 8000 series hardware without having to suffer through the pains of the usual new product learning curve.
In some ways the timing of Continue reading