High-performance network provider Arista Networks Inc. today announced the next wave of innovations for its campus network solutions.
The new products include expansion of its Virtual ES with Path Aliasing, or VESPA, offering, which will make it easier for businesses to deploy large-scale mobility domains. The Santa Clara networking company also announced it is expanding its Autonomous Virtual Assistant, or AVA, its agentic artificial intelligence solution, to help organizations streamline AI operations use cases.
Arista is well-known in high-performance networking environments where mass scale is critical. It has been knocking on the enterprise campus door for some time, including wireless. This release presents an excellent opportunity for Arista to bring its strengths in reliability, operational simplicity and mass scaling to wireless domains, including outdoor domains.
The company’s rapid growth has been by delivering a single, consistent experience across the network. For its enterprise customers, this means AI and data center, cloud, campus, branch, wireless and wide-area network. The operational simplicity and scale have been achieved with EOS, its single operating system, unified data lake of streamed telemetry (NetDL) and AVA.
Arista looks to now bring its strengths to the scaling limits enterprises experience thanks to rapid growth in the number of clients and internet of things devices they deploy. VESPA brings campus networks the consistent, large-scale principles typically used in the data center by enabling customers to design massive Wi-Fi roaming domain networks that support more than a half-million clients and 30,000 access points.
“This also allows our customers to completely simplify the network design, because previously they had to worry about deploying a large campus,” Sriram Venkiteswaran, Arista’s senior director of product line management, said in a prebriefing. He added “They would worry about splitting the campus into multiple domains, each having to set up its own IP address, VLAN and sub-routing. So there’s a lot of design complexity involved in the traditional way. With this approach, having a single mobility domain, we’ve taken away all the complexity from designing the network.”
The second benefit of this solution, he explained, “goes back to us building a CNC [centralized network controller] across all layers of the network. Again, in the traditional controller world, when you have controller failures you typically have downtime of a minute or two, and that can be disastrous for some applications, especially in healthcare, where a doctor is on a call and then the controller fails and just drops the entire connection. It takes minutes to recover. And this is becoming more urgent, especially in native mission-critical environments such as manufacturing and healthcare. Customers want this seamless connectivity across their network. VESPA is designed to solve these two problems.”
One of Arista’s VESPA customers, Arizona State University, said the campus is transitioning to Arista’s controllerless Wi-Fi to “help shape and validate the development of Arista’s VESPA architecture — a standards-based approach designed to provide a seamless wireless roaming domain that improves connectivity across the university,” said Jorge De Cossio, senior director of digital infrastructure and enterprise technology for ASU.
This emphasis on campus mobility and agentic AI comes at a key time for Arista. Though many potential customers may think of the company as primarily a hyperscaler provider, that background plays well today, as the characteristics of campus and hyperscaler networks in the AI era are not significantly different. To serve both categories, a vendor needs to deliver reliable, always-on bandwidth and zero-trust operations, both of which Arista provides. As campus networks deploy more AI-driven solutions, its expertise should be appealing.
Focus on AIOps with AVA
On the pre-briefing, Jeff Raymond, Arista’s vice president of EOS software and services, told me that when the company talks to customers about what it can provide in the area of AIOps, some say they just “want an easy button,” while others say they barely trust anything but their command-line interface and question whether Arista is going to “automatically start self-driving my network.” Raymond said the company isn’t focusing on replacing jobs but rather using AVA’s AI capabilities to provide assistance to the network operator so that they can do their job better, focus on higher-order priorities, and get answers more quickly or prevent issues from happening.
Raymond said network teams are “typically a more cautious group” when it comes to deploying automation technologies such as AI. “Getting them to move to automation is still a little bit of a human change agent, and this is just one step.” AVA’s expanded capabilities include:
- Multi-domain event correlation across wired, wireless, data center, and security to pinpoint a single root cause;
- Agentic conversational and troubleshooting capabilities in Ask AVA for sophisticated, multi-turn dialogue that follows the user’s train of thought; and
- Continuous monitoring and automated root cause analysis for proactive issue identification.
Over the past year, I’ve noticed a marked change in the attitude regarding AI within the networking community. Coming into 2025, there was a tremendous amount of fear of AI taking one’s job. Now that AI has worked its way into our day to day lives, that opinion of AI has shifted from, “It’s going to take my job,” to “How did I ever do my job without it” What’s become clear is AI tools, such as AVA, aren’t the enemy, they’re engineers’ best friend because it lets them work faster and smarter.
Ruggedized platforms for industrial environments
Arista will also debut two new ruggedized platforms for deployment in industrial or outdoor environments across a variety of sectors. The platforms are a 20-port DIN Rail switch with an IP50 rating, and a 1RU 24-port switch with an IP30 rating. The IP ratings indicate the devices are suitable for use in industrial environments, since they can withstand extreme temperatures, vibrations and shocks.
The entry into the ruggedized area was a bit of a surprise to me because these products are typically lower-margin than traditional networking products and Arista is an extremely margin focused and the financial results reflect that. Raymond explained Arista isn’t moving into the ruggedized market as a new product category to lead with. Rather, this is for Arista’s manufacturing, warehouse and other customers where they buy other products from Arista but must go to a competitor for these switches. This rounds out the portfolio and lets the company extend the “end to end” Arista value proposition.
Arista says it expects the new software capabilities and switch platforms to be generally available in the first quarter of 2026.
