Since it was founded in 2004, Arista Networks Inc. has been known as a company that makes great network switches. This has been done with great hardware and a single, open operating system that spans all its products. In 2015, the company launched “CloudVision,” which moved the management, orchestration, and automation capabilities into the cloud.
The cloud industry is currently undergoing a significant sea change. The term “cloud” has been used to describe public cloud services. Over the past few years, buyers’ attitudes toward cloud services have noticed a notable change, with private and hybrid deployments rising. This trend isn’t limited to communications; it has been seen more broadly.
Juniper Networks Inc. is focusing on helping customers move artificial intelligence in their networks from vision to reality, and today it laid out its plans at its AI-Native NOW customer event at the New York Stock Exchange. Over the last several years, Juniper has developed strong AI networking products, and interest in AI for networking is extremely high, as engineers need help keeping up with modern networks’ complexity.
Cisco Systems Inc. provided positive numbers in its fiscal fourth-quarter results Wednesday, and there’s a story behind those numbers. The networking giant posted a modest revenue beat of $13.64 billion, $100 million more than consensus estimates. Gross margin, boosted by the acquisition of Splunk Inc., came in at a whopping 67.5%, the highest number for Cisco in 20 years. Product order growth rose 14% year over year, 6% excluding Splunk.
There has been plenty of hype and ballyhoo around artificial intelligence and networking, but much of the vendor focus has been AI for networking, where AI is used to improve network operations. The other side of the AI coin is networking for AI, where a network must be designed and provisioned to support an AI implementation. Though many businesses will likely deploy AI in the cloud, making the supporting network the problem of the hyperscaler, 58% of respondents to a recent ZK Research/theCube Research study stated they have deployed or will be deploying AI in their own private data center.