Arista almost done with Cisco workarounds as revenue and profit soar

Customer certification delays resulting from Cisco's ongoing litigation have delayed some of its revenue, but Arista Networks has achieved a good fourth quarter 2017 and full year performance.

The company announced Friday revenues of $ 467.9 million for Q4 2017, up 42.7% over Q4 2016 and a result of $ 1.6 billion in 2017, up 45.8% over the same period last year. compared to 2016. Fourth-quarter earnings were 103.8 million full years.

In part, the results reflect the end of the lawsuit. The company announced the availability of its workaround for the so-called "945 patent" in September 2016, but CEO Jayshree Ullal said that during the earnings call, customers had to start certifying that Workarounds would work in their environment.

"The majority of these certifications were completed in the fourth quarter," said Ullal, but "some overflowed in the first quarter."

Only the most complex cases missed the end of 2017, she said.

Microsoft has provided a highlight for the company. According to Mr. Ullal, Arista was able to expand its activities in Redmond's business and, thanks to international expansion (for example, a data center in Israel), Redmond accounted for 16% of the company's sales (as in 2016).

Ullal expects Arista's other "cloud titan" clients to continue growing, and at the same time, this segment will rebalance the business towards non-US revenues (earlier this month, the Cisco's nemesis) made a similar prediction could flatten out, big clouds need to create data centers closer to users in the rest of the world). Over time, up to 60 percent of Arista's business could come from international markets, she said.

The move to 100 Gbps Ethernet and 400 Gbps Ethernet is starting, but Ullal says it's a trend that will last for many years: Current 100 Gbps deploys serve what it calls a long queue of ports 10 Gbps and a growth number of ports 40 Gbps.

A similar model will be played in the fastest speeds: 400 Gbps Ethernet will take its place to trunk traffic driven by workloads of 40 Gbps and 100 Gbps. In most of Arista's biggest customers, she believes that the 400 Gbps trial will begin in 2019.

As we reported last week, Arista won another victory, confirming the previous ruling of the Trial and Appeal Board to invalidate Cisco's "Patent 668" (US Patent 7,224,668, which covers security and traffic of the calling aircraft). flow management ").

Arista results documents are there for those of you looking for safe sleep aids. ®