‘India is a pull-market for Arista’
How are things progressing for Arista?
Since Arista has surpassed a major customer milestone, we are on a celebrating spree. Within a span of 3 years, the company has sold its services to 1,000 customers in just 1,000 days. We are progressing at a rate of 1 customer/day and it’s phenomenal. We are emerging as a thought leader in enterprise and cloud networking. One of the crucial developments is that we have transitioned from just selling to financials and diversified to cloud providers and web 2.0 applications.
What has led to this growth?
A key reason for Arista’s success has been the overall product quality, primarily derived from the robust architecture of Extensible Operating Systems (EOS). Arista started shipping production units in 2008 and found early-adopter markets in financial trading, cloud computing, natural resources exploration, and research and scientific modeling. Many of these are traditionally challenging markets for the new companies to support. Arista has approximately 75% of its revenue coming from North America and in 2010 expanded into key geographies in Asia, Japan, Europe, and Latin America.
The co- founder of Arista, Andy Bechtolsheim had also set up Sun, Kealia, Cheriton but he sold it, do you think Arista, the fourth venture would face a similar exit?
We have no exit plans. We are in on an exciting growth path. All the founders are on a mission, we are really building a company to last and an independent company. We are not just investing in engineering but also in customer support, sales and marketing. We are also profitable now.
Were there any challenges?
Of course there were challenges. Arista was bewildered by 3 disruptions— hardware, software, and customers buying disruption while they were moving from an enterprise to cloud. We resolved hardware disruption by building the non-blocking network and we came up with a 3-tier architecture. Though we are into contract manufacturing, yet the work is supervised personally. We had been working on EOS, our core product area, since 2004. EOS fixed the software disruption and it gave a tremendous advantage for a young company like us. This software is self-healing, open, and offers zero touch positioning (ZTO). And, Latency Application Analyser (LAZ) alerts before the network gets congested, so that the overloading can be fixed at the congestion point.
What are your plans to tap the Indian market?
On R&D front, India is a vibrant market. Currently, the Indian market is a pullmarket for us. We will invest in 2012 and expect it to be a 3-year journey.
We have three engineering facilities – Bengaluru (in Asia), London (Europe), California (US). Around 80% of our strength is in the US and we are expecting 10-15% of it to be in India and another 5-10% will be in the UK.
malinin@cybermedia.co.in