The acquisition draws Arista closer to Ericsson, said Arista’s CEO
Arista Networks announced this week that it has acquired unified cloud network company Pluribus Networks, developers of unified cloud networking technology. Arista’s COO, Anshul Sadana, said the move will bolster its efforts to develop next-generation smart edge and telco cloud applications. Arista will be incorporating Pluribus Networks’ solutions as part of its overall Unified Cloud Fabric (UCF) platform, according to a blog post by Sadana.
Terms of the acquisition were not disclosed. Pluribus has been a partner of Ericsson’s since 2016.
UCF is an evolution of Arista’s Converged Cloud Platform, which leverages virtual private cloud and virtual network instances running on customer premises to deliver cloud-based Network as a Service (NaaS) capabilities. The company said UCF’s development was driven to meet 4G and 5G Communication Service Provider (CSP) needs for low latency, high bandwidth, availability, and speed requirements.
“The Unified Cloud Fabric built-in analytics provides real-time contextual visibility across the fabric and one-click troubleshooting workflows across multiple domains, enabling NetOps, DevOps and CloudOps teams to effectively collaborate and rapidly on-board applications and tenants,” explained Sadana.
The company describes UCF as “a holistic compute virtualization fabric across any workload environment.” It enables businesses to create a common Software-Defined Networking (SDN) overlay for multiple compute environments, maintain visibility of inbound and outbound traffic for Virtual Machines (VMs). It also leverages Data Processing Unit (DPU) hardware for network and security service acceleration.
Arista’s acquisition got a thumbs up from Ericsson.
“Together we have built a telco-grade networking fabric solution used in NFVI deployments. The acquisition of Pluribus by Arista Networks will further the Ericsson partnership with Arista Networks and benefit our joint customers deploying Ericsson’s NFVI solution through Arista and Ericsson’s combined networking expertise,” said Lars Martensson, head of solutions area cloud and NFVi at Ericsson AB.
Arista CEO Jayshree Ullal also noted the acquisition to analysts during the company’s second quarter earnings call earlier this week.
Terms of the acquisition were not disclosed.
During that call, the company reported $1.052 billion in revenue for its second quarter, a 20% year-over-year increase, and net income of $299.1 million, or $0.94 per diluted share. Ullal noted that lingering supply chain issues will continue to drag down the company’s revenue numbers, with some parts backordered from suppliers for more than a year. Ullal described for analysts Pluribus’ leadership in 5G and telco cloud as a strong draw for Arista.
“We are really excited to forge a new relationship with Ericsson through our Pluribus acquisition,” she said.
Arista’s Pluribus buy marks its second strategic acquisition in 2022. Earlier this year, the company bought Untangle, a network security software developer best known for edge threat detection. Arista incorporated Untangle’s technology into its Cognitive Unified Edge (CUE) solution, which launched during the second quarter.
