Arista annual sales are close to 9~10B with approx 4500 employees, while Cisco annual sales are 56B with 86000 employees. To compare it - Arista is doing 20% of Cisco sales with 5% of employees. Conclusion is simple: Cisco has too many redundant employees.
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Juniper had 2.5 times employee count and half of revenue of Arista
...the fact that Arista has a single operating system can not be overstated.
The funny thing is even if you have a first generation card and a second generation reduced cost card with all the same functionality in the same chassis it wasn't uncommon on multiple Cisco operating systems to cut and paste a different CLI for that second card. There were a myriad of other changes individual platforms made to common code breaking documented behavior for every other platform and as people syncing and collapsing branches arbitrarily choose alternating behaviors a changing subset of platforms was being broken in perpetuity. These are all Intro to Programming 101 mistakes that Cisco not only couldn't solve but rarely recognized as mistakes over decades and the customers paid dearly for them.
@cf - They are successful. Network fleet replacement takes time. Arista is earning the enterprise. Cisco is losing the enterprise. Advantage Arista.
Have three directors in my org! The amount of work they do vs the amount they get paid is just unreal. At the end when the layoffs happen, unfortunately they just impact the bottom line.
Worked for both Cisco and Arista before I retired and so I don’t have a dog in the fight. I spent most of my time with both companies as a TAC engineer and from that perspective the fact that Arista has a single operating system can not be overstated. I can not imagine how difficult it must be to maintain the myriad of operating systems that Cisco employs. Supporting them was a nightmare by itself.
@b9 Out of those 82k employees there are probably 10k mid-level managers that do nothing. Just sit there and su.ck up to upper management and directors. Mid level leaders should be cut ASAP. Teams will be better off with less Indian style micro management.
@cz 100%. Security is even worse with a whole ton of different products, literally dozens, with words like "APIs" and "architecture" thrown around to attempt to answer the sticky customer question of how it all works together. Complete BS. Everyone knows it. Even the dotard G2.
Arista has it too easy. How many overlapping DC solutions does Cisco propose? Four! NX, ACI, Hyperfabric, Meraki. They all do the same thing. It's such a waste of resources. Sales folks must navigate obscure decision trees to figure out what to pitch. Zero vision or strategy. Throw stuff out and see what sticks.
Arista is eating Cisco slowly even without a salt. For those who glorify Cisco for having more features and better products/silicon, don’t forget that the 1$ has the same value no matter where it came from. Arista is simply better.
Arista tried to get into wireless and enterprise switching for many years. Are they successful?
Their bread and butter is data center switching and stable software.
Cisco is more like end to end solution with everything in it. Enterprise Customers have to deal with just one company. Advantage Cisco in enterprise!!
Arista is focused on being a network company. Not constantly trying to decide if it's security, software, AI, network, telephony, etc etc
Quality vs. Quantity
A strong argument for further layoffs. Apparently, they are justified...
Cisco has far too many redundant routing and switching operating systems with far too much redundant code in each system forked out across far too many branches. The result is an exponential growth in technical debt built over two decades longer than Arista has existed. Cisco also has far more diverse business segments so they can't leverage common experience across them as well a company like Arista can.
A better comparison is Cisco vs HPE where Cisco generates 68% more revenue (57.7B/34.3B) with almost 29% more employees (86200/67000.) Cisco also has over 105X the profit margin (17.9%/0.17%.)
Arista has proper engineers with engineering qualifications and is not the realm of the charlatan Patels.
Beating Arista is simple, give the people what they want, ACI was a answer to a question no one asked or wanted, sure they are cheaper but deliver simple VXLAN with a good management interface, not rocket science but we had to go the wrong way again and push errant segmentation that some lunatic thought up to get promoted. Read the room ELT.
No matter how you count the employees (Blue/Red badge) this company shall layoff at least 30% of its workforce.
Cisco does not have 86000 employees. If they do then they’ve been lying to the tax authorities on a scale that would see chuck in prison…. 40% of that number will be contractors… and not classed as employees. So your math is wrong.
Does Arista lug around a hopelessly broken dead-weight security "business"?
Cisco would be much more attractive without SBG.