Mumbai: In a strategic move to take on the substantial share of networking vendors such as Cisco, Juniper and others, Hewlett Packard Enterprise (HPE) and Arista Networks have announced an extension of their partnership.
Both the companies inked a new strategic partnership, at the HPE Global Partner Conference, held in Boston recently in front of above 1,300 channel partners. The partnership enables customers and partners to buy Arista switches through HPE.
HPE announced its collaboration with Arista Networks in software-defined infrastructure environments in 2015. With the extension, Arista Networks will advance HPE’s strategy to provide secure Hybrid IT solutions built on the software-defined data center infrastructure portfolio. Arista Networks deliver software-driven cloud networking solutions for large data center storage and computing environments.
The partnership expands the existing HPE Converged Architecture agreement the company announced last June. The agreement focused on building application workload reference architectures as part of the HPE Converged Architecture ecosystem. Partners and customers can purchase Arista Networks switching products directly from HPE starting November 7, 2016.
Partners are very optimistic about the collaboration and said that the tie-up strengthen the HPE portfolio, enabling channel partners to tap Cisco’s hybrid cloud customers as well as its Unified Computing System. They said that the joint force would heat up the competition in the networking space, making it more tough and untimely, benefiting the channel on the front of solution offerings.
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“Adding Arista to our current HPE FlexFabric and Altoline product lines will expand our ability to address a wider variety of data center networking customer use cases and requirements. Moving forward, Arista will be our preferred networking partner in Data Center Networking as an infrastructure foundation for HPE’s software-defined infrastructure solutions”, said Antonio Neri, Executive Vice President and General Manager, Enterprise Group for Hewlett Packard Enterprise.
The partnership has also heated the legal dispute between Cisco and Arista Networks.
In June 2016, the International Trade Commission ruled that Arista networking switches infringed on three of the five patents cited in a lawsuit filed by Cisco in December 2014, recommending a ban on selling and importing several Arista products. While Cisco claims that halt of Arista products found with infringing technology, Arista maintained that it has since released new versions with design-around to address features the commission ruled were infringed upon.
Cisco which led the networking market for long, saw a sharp drop in revenue in recent years. According to CRN report, the company lost share in 2015, with revenue share declining from 62.1 percent to 60.7 percent and shipment share falling from 46.9 percent to 44.2 percent. Santa Clara, California based Arista Networks, meanwhile, continues to be one of the fastest-growing vendors in the data center, with product revenue growth of more than 40 percent in 2015 year over year.
Software-defined networking continues to gain market traction as an innovative architectural model capable of enabling automated provisioning, network virtualization, and network programmability for data centers at cloud-providers and enterprise networks. Although SDN initially found favor in hyper-scale data centers and at large-scale cloud service providers, it is also winning adoption in a growing number of enterprise data centers across a broad range of vertical markets.
According to Crehan Research’s latest Data Center Switch Long-Range Forecast Report, a confluence of faster data center Ethernet switch upgrades will propel the market to $15 billion by 2020. The firm projects that 100 gigabit Ethernet (GbE) switching will ramp strongly by the second half of this year and that 400GbE will experience robust growth in 2018.