The Network Doesn't Lie: Getting to Know Arista Through WWT's Associate Academy
The first time I truly understood what a network was, it had stopped working. A school project due at midnight, a router that decided otherwise, and the sudden, visceral realisation that everything I needed to do existed somewhere I couldn't reach. That feeling — of being one layer of infrastructure away from everything, has never really left me. It's probably why Arista's core belief resonates so immediately:
"The network isn't infrastructure. It's the whole game."
Someone once told me that you can learn everything you need to know about a company in the first five minutes of talking to their people. Not from what they say — from how they say it. Whether the pride is genuine, whether the knowledge runs deep, whether they're selling you something or sharing something. I thought about that a lot during Arista's Partner of the Month sessions this spring. Because within the first few minutes, it was obvious: these are people who genuinely love what they build.
A Company That Does One Thing Exceptionally Well
WWT's Associate Academy hosts a monthly Partner of the Month series designed to connect our teams with valued partners, build relationships, and give us the kind of depth you can't get from a product sheet. June belonged to Arista Networks, and over three sessions we heard from John Schwendeman and Miguel Balagot — two people whose depth of knowledge and obvious pride in their work made every hour feel well spent.
Arista was founded in 2008 with a deliberately narrow focus: networking, and nothing else. No servers. No storage. No professional services. Just switching and routing, done to an exceptionally high standard. That focus has compounded over nearly two decades into a company approaching $11 billion in annual revenue — one that has, against most predictions, overtaken Cisco in data centre switching.
John made a point early in our first session that has stayed with me. He talked about companies that were once dominant in IT — household names — that didn't keep investing in getting better, and either got absorbed or disappeared entirely. It wasn't a veiled competitive jab. It was a genuine reflection on what it takes to stay relevant in this industry, and a quiet statement of intent about what Arista is committed to being.
"If you don't stay focused on continually getting better in the IT world, you're going to render yourself irrelevant at some point."
— John Schwendeman, Arista
Simple to Say, Hard to Deliver
Three things differentiate Arista, and they come up in every conversation: one operating system, world-class support, and products built to last.
The single OS story — EOS running identically from a one-rack-unit campus switch to a 16-line-card hyperscale chassis — sounds like a marketing line until you think about what it actually means for a customer. One platform to learn. One codebase to troubleshoot. No re-training when you add a new part of the network. For organisations managing thousands of devices across data centres and campuses, that is not a small thing.
The support story is similarly easy to dismiss until you hear the specifics. Arista's Net Promoter Score is 89 — up from 87, a climb that takes real, sustained work to achieve. When a customer calls in, they are speaking to an Arista engineer within 30 seconds. Not a tier-one screener. An engineer who has direct access to the person who wrote the code for the specific module causing the issue. John said he'd never experienced anything like it in nearly 40 years of hardware sales. That kind of statement, from someone who has seen a lot, carries weight.
And then there is longevity. Arista does not aggressively retire products when a new chipset arrives. Some switches have been on the market for over 12 years, still actively supported. When a product does reach end-of-sale, there are five more years of support beyond that. From introduction to true end-of-life, some products will have a 15-year runway. For organisations making capital investments in infrastructure, that matters enormously.
Where the Technology Lives — and Why It Matters to WWT
The second session went deep on data centre architecture, and Miguel walked us through the kind of technical detail that is genuinely useful when you are sitting across from a customer. The distinction between shallow and deep buffer switching — when to use each, and why the wrong choice can create real problems for AI and storage workloads — was one of those things I wished I had understood years earlier.
The AI fabric story is where Arista is growing fastest right now. Meta has committed $80 billion to AI infrastructure this year alone. Google, Microsoft, and Netflix are all Arista customers. The switches running the content delivery infrastructure that streams your Thursday night viewing — those are Arista. Miguel said it with a smile, and it landed. This is not a company operating at the edges of the market.
The third session covered campus networking and security, and it was where Arista's philosophy felt most cohesive. Their security portfolio — AGNI for network access control, WIPS for wireless intrusion detection, DMF for packet capture and forensics — is native to the platform, not acquired and stapled on. The live demo of WIPS locating a rogue device on Miguel's home network in real time, within a single dashboard, with no additional tooling required, was one of those moments where the technology stops being abstract.
All of it — data centre, campus, security, AI OPS, SD-WAN — is managed through Cloud Vision, Arista's single management platform. Change control with director approval. Zero-touch provisioning. Real-time telemetry you can query conversationally. The kind of operational clarity that, once you have it, makes it hard to go back to anything else.
"Everything happens on the network. Every company that has been breached, they've been breached over their network."
— John Schwendeman, Arista
The Relationship Behind the Product
What I keep coming back to, a few weeks removed from our sessions, is not a specific product feature. It's the quality of the people who showed up to share it with us.
John and Miguel brought the same energy to our third session that they brought to the first. They answered every question — from the most technical to the most basic — with patience and genuine enthusiasm. They were not running through slides to hit a quota. They were sharing something they clearly believe in, with people they genuinely wanted to help.
That matters at WWT, because our relationship with Arista is not transactional. Arista switches are live in our Advanced Technology Centre in Building 60 in St Louis, providing fabric connectivity to NVIDIA GPUs in our AI Proving Ground. There is a Gen AI POC pod — Pure Storage, Supermicro, and Arista 7060 — ready for customer proof-of-concept work right now. This is a partnership with physical presence, shared infrastructure, and shared investment in outcomes.
John closed our final session with something that I think captures both Arista and WWT at our best. He talked about the founders of WWT having the courage to call themselves Worldwide when there were three people in St Louis. The vision to name what you intend to become, before you have become it. It was a generous thing to say. It was also, I think, a recognition that both companies are built on something similar: a belief that if you do the work with integrity and keep getting better, the results follow.
"I thoroughly enjoy the opportunity to discuss solutions from Arista with the amazingly bright and talented Associates from WWT. They have great futures ahead and Arista is proud to partner with WWT in these training sessions."
— John Schwendeman, Arista
Three sessions in, I have a much better sense of what Arista is, what they stand for, and where they are going. More than that, I have a sense of who they are — and that, as anyone who has built a long customer relationship knows, is ultimately what you are betting on.