Two of Arista's founders had already sold a company to Cisco, and then they built the company Cisco would sue. Andy Bechtolsheim, a co-founder of Sun Microsystems, teamed up with Stanford professor David Cheriton and engineer Ken Duda. Their switches moved data between servers in the huge data centers that cloud companies were building. When Arista filed to go public in March 2014, those data centers were growing faster than the old network gear could keep up.

Software on Cheap Chips

The company started in 2004 under the name Arastra and became Arista in 2008. That year Jayshree Ullal, a longtime Cisco executive, joined as chief executive. Arista's bet was software. It wrote one operating system, EOS, that ran across all its switches and let customers program the network themselves. It built on chips that other firms sold, so it could move fast. Its first big buyers were trading firms and cloud companies that wanted speed above everything else.

Cisco in the Courtroom

Arista priced its IPO at $43 a share on June 5, 2014, above its target range. The stock jumped by roughly 30 percent when it opened on the New York Stock Exchange the next day. Six months later Cisco sued, claiming Arista had copied its patents and command language. The fight ran for years. In 2018 Arista agreed to pay Cisco $400 million to settle it. Arista still trades on the NYSE under ANET and sells to the largest cloud companies.

Cover: Wheat Field, Charles Émile Jacque. Art Institute of Chicago, public domain. Chosen for a wheat field (arista, the bristle on an ear of grain).