Cisco vs Arista Networks
Side-by-side comparison of AI visibility scores, market position, and capabilities
San Jose enterprise networking and security (NASDAQ: CSCO) at ~$57B annual revenue; $28B Splunk acquisition completed March 2024 integrating SIEM/SOAR with Cisco Security Cloud competing with Palo Alto Networks for enterprise cybersecurity.
About
Cisco Systems Inc. is a San Jose, California-based global technology conglomerate — publicly traded on NASDAQ (NASDAQ: CSCO) as a Dow Jones Industrial Average and S&P 500 component — generating approximately $57 billion in annual revenue and employing 86,000+ employees across 150+ countries, operating as the world's leading enterprise networking equipment manufacturer and an expanding cybersecurity and observability platform following the $28 billion acquisition of Splunk (completed March 2024, Cisco's largest-ever acquisition). Cisco's product portfolio spans networking (Catalyst switches, ASR routers, Meraki cloud-managed networking), security (Duo MFA, Cisco Firepower, Umbrella DNS security, SecureX XDR), collaboration (Webex conferencing, Webex Calling), data center (Nexus switches, UCS servers, HyperFlex HCI), and observability (Splunk SIEM/SOAR, AppDynamics APM, ThousandEyes network intelligence). CEO Chuck Robbins has led the company since 2015. Founded 1984 by Stanford computer scientists Leonard Bosack and Sandy Lerner.
Santa Clara cloud networking (NYSE: ANET) at $7.0B FY2024 revenue (+20%); AI networking +50%, 400G/800G GPU cluster switches for Microsoft/Meta/Google competing with Cisco and NVIDIA InfiniBand for AI data center fabric.
About
Arista Networks, Inc. is a Santa Clara, California-based cloud networking company — publicly traded on the New York Stock Exchange (NYSE: ANET) as an S&P 500 Information Technology component with a market capitalization of approximately $120 billion — designing and selling programmable Ethernet switches, routers, and network management software for cloud data centers, artificial intelligence compute clusters, and enterprise campus networks through approximately 4,400 employees worldwide. In fiscal year 2024, Arista reported revenue of $7.0 billion (+20% year-over-year), with AI networking revenue growing more than 50% as hyperscale customers (Microsoft, Meta, Google) deployed Arista's 400G and 800G Ethernet switches as the network fabric interconnecting tens of thousands of NVIDIA H100 and H200 GPUs in AI training clusters. CEO Jayshree Ullal has led Arista since 2008, executing the strategy of building the world's most advanced Ethernet switching operating system (EOS, Extensible Operating System) and using EOS's programmability and reliability advantages to win the hyperscale cloud data center market from Cisco — a share gain that created Arista's growth from a startup to a $7B+ revenue company in a decade. Arista's EOS software runs across the entire product family (campus, data center, AI cluster switches) with a single code base and management plane, enabling network operators to write Python scripts and custom automation for every switch in the network from one operating system.
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