Former Cisco SVP Building SDN Empire at Arista Networks

The entrepreneurial spirit certainly lives within Jayshree Ullal, president and CEO of Arista Networks. For more than five years, the former Cisco Systems (CSCO) senior vice president of Data Center and Switching, has been busy building the product portfolio and reputation of Arista, which is aiming to become a software-defined networking (SDN) leader.

A Cisco employee for more than 15 years, Ullal helped to build Cisco’s switching business to $10 billion in annual revenue. A pretty good feat in and of itself, considering the criticisms Cisco received early on when it paired an acquired switching portfolio with its already existing routing product lines. That was a big no-no back in the mid-’90s.

Ullal recently told The Hindu Business Line that she felt the entrepreneurial spirit within a large company when she was growing Cisco’s switching business, but after a while, she longed to be leading an independent networking business again. She originally joined Cisco when the company purchased Crescendo.

Today, Arista may not be the giant that Cisco is, but it is beginning to give Cisco some serious competition, particularly in the software-defined networking (SDN) space. Most networking companies are at least looking at SDN and considering how to capture a piece of the growing pie as the market continues to mature; and Arista is no exception.

With its cloud networking approach to business in recent years, Arista is already playing well in the overall networking market—and it’s doing so through a community of channel partners.

Ullal wrote a blog post about SDN cloud networking prior to the holiday season. Although she noted that there has been much hype about SDN, she also wrote that the hype is beginning to settle down. Will that mean an increased market in 2014? At least some, but it seems as though SDN will still take some extra time to reach end user customers, many of which are still struggling with the concept and what it will mean for their organizations.

As she is trying to further the SDN education of customers and compete against networking companies much larger than her own, Ullal also told The Hindu Business Line that she would like to see more women enter technical fields.

It’s still a male-dominated industry, but Ullal noted encouraging young girls and women to pursue mathematics and science educations is important.