While we are spinning our wheels.
Who, on the exec side, is responsible for this?
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Hence difficult for Cisco to grow a lot.
Growth is relative to size. Looking at the numbers from @dp Arista adding around $3.4B was a 61% gain but if you apply $3.4B to Cisco's starting point around $58B it would represent less than a 6% gain.
Arista, interestingly did not grow as fast as the average that was significantly lifted by the massive AI buildout that Nvidia has engineered – and engineered over the past decade brilliantly, we might add – had Ethernet switch sales of $1.83 billion, up “only” 33.5 percent year on year and up “only” 12.4 percent sequentially.
Cisco technical staff struggle to articulate so many products, software and services. It is impossible. Whilst Arista, PA, DataDog and others focus on what they do well. Cisco tries to be everything to everyone and isn't good at anything with poor quality across the board. This is Cisco's problem.
Nvidia will take over the data center switching soon or increase their share of market.
Arista is in few markets and can grow. They are executing well.
Cisco is into multiple markets, many products and different technologies will lesser profit or growth but they are required for end to end solution. Hence difficult for Cisco to grow a lot.
Facts:
Cisco's ttm revenue on 10/31/2023 was $58.034B and on 1/31/2026 was $59.054B, but Splunk was bought in the interim bringing in $4B in revenue its last year, so Cisco appears to have lost almost 5% of revenue over that time period, and this doesn't account for inflation.
Artista's ttm revenue on 9/30/2023 was $5.595B and on 12/31/2025 was $9.006B for a 61% increase.
As an investor only one of these is a growth story.
That $14.51 billion dollars in Ethernet switch spending worldwide in Q2 happened through the consumption of 353.8 million ports, most of them not in the datacenter. A total of 12,374 exabits per second of capacity was installed in Q2 2025, and 20.6 percent of that came from 800 Gb/sec switches, 47.8 percent came from 200 Gb/sec and 400 Gb/sec switches, and 24.4 percent came from 100 Gb/sec switches.
Facts:
Cisco Systems is still the dominant supplier of Ethernet switches across the datacenter, the edge, and the campus, but perhaps not for long given the expected demand of AI clusters in the coming years.
Nvidia’s Ethernet business is now larger than that of Arista Networks, which has been dogging Cisco in the datacenter for the past decade and a half and which aimed to break $10 billion in sales next year, two years earlier than its top brass had planned. And even with the just completed Juniper acquisition, the embiggened HPE Networking will have trouble catching Nvidia in the datacenter even moreso than both Cisco and Arista.
A focused company will always beat a company distracted with other market segments.
The more time, energy and money Cisco wastes on trying to make SBG a thing, the more it will be distracted away from its core markets.
Cisco competitors, from Arista to DataDog to CrowdStrike...they all make forward progress while Cisco stumbles around trying (and failing) to participate in all of these segments.
The employee base is weaker here. Take responsibility
On the routing and switching side Cisco had four extremely broken operating systems and across a much broader spectrum of products they had hardware and software pulled from a massive number of acquisitions before some of its people walked out to create Arista with a much narrower product line, some of the very few who learned from the mistakes of the past, and software skills that went at least as far forward as the 1960s.
Because they are better
Arista is focused on quality while Cisco is focused on marketing and subscriptions. It's hard to attach a subscription when customer don't want the product.
Fire the leaders so they can fix Arista Networks.
Look at DC product marketing. Figma demos and amateur messaging. It's all about impressing the emperor. The one with no clothes.