Arista Advances Cognitive Computing Effort With New Mojo

Arista announced the acquisition of Mojo on Aug. 2, the same day the company announced its second quarter fiscal 2018 financial results. For the quarter, Arista reported revenue of $519.8 million for a 28 percent year-over-year gain. Net Income was reported at $150.7 million up from $102.7 million in the second quarter of fiscal 2017. Looking forward the company provided third quarter guidance for revenue between $540 and $552 million.

“Arista introduced our formal entry into the campus market with our Spline products and the Cognitive Management Plane architecture,” Jayshree Ullal, CEO of Arista said during her company’s earnings call.

The spline products include Artista’s 7300X3 and 7050X3 switches which create a new model for campus networking architecture. Ullal said that with spline model, Arista is collapsing the aggregation and co-layers into a single tier.

The cognitive part of Arista’s strategy is a take on intent based networking, which is enabled with Arista’s CloudVision Cognitive Management Plane.

“CloudVision gathers all network state to a single place, keeping historical information as long as the customer wants it and analyzing and learning from all of that state,” Kenneth Duda, CTO of Arista explained. “Operators enforce network-wide policy centrally, and CloudVision autonomously ensures that policy is implemented correctly across the entire network, plugging any compliance issues and creating workflows applied on approval to bring devices back into full compliance.”

Mojo Networks

The Mojo Networks acquisition ties directly into Arista’s cognitive networking vision.

“Today, Arista is also announcing its first acquisition, Mojo Networks, to expand into the Cognitive WiFi edge,” Ullal said. “We believe, the cloud-managed Cognitive WiFi is a very natural complement to our next-generation campus and cloud networking portfolio.

Financial terms of the Mojo Networks acquisition have not been publicly disclosed. Mojo Networks was founded in 2012 and had raised approximately $69.4 million in venture funding.

Duda said that Mojo pioneered Cognitive WiFi, in which WiFi state streams from access points to a centralized open source data store for analysis. In his view, the combination of Mojo’s cognitive WiFi with CloudVision is a great combination, extending CloudVision’s reach enterprise-wide from the WiFi client across the campus to the enterprise data center and all the way to the cloud.

“So the synergy for us is to really focus on making Mojo a software-based acquisition, where we care less about the access point and we care more about the cognitive control, the integration into CloudVision, and the CMP (Cognitive Management Plane) architecture. – enterprisenetworkingplanet