Cisco, Arista trial reveals bad blood over switch technology

The case is part of a broader legal fight pitting the world’s largest networking equipment maker against upstart rival Arista Networks, founded by Cisco executives and headquartered about 2 miles away.

While Cisco has always been a training ground for networking industry leaders, Executive Chairman John Chambers has a good chance of running into former employees when he testifies this week because they are now his adversaries.

Arista reflects a change in the networking industry that challenges Cisco’s biggest source of revenue: its 56.5 percent share of the switching market valued at $25.6 billion in 2015 by IDC.

The smaller company has taken market share with software-based products that appeal to some of the biggest networking gear buyers, who are looking for alternatives to Cisco’s expensive hardware and locked-down software.

The $500 million in damages Cisco seeks is a drop in the bucket for a company that posted $12.4 billion of revenue in its most recent quarter.

The case centers around Cisco’s allegation that Arista infringed its copyrighted command line interface terms — words used to control hardware and software functions — to make it easier for customers to switch to Arista gear.

Jayshree Ullal, Arista’s current CEO, founder and chairman Andy Bechtolsheim, the heads of its software and hardware engineering and four of the seven members of its board of directors all used to work for Cisco.

Charlie Giancarlo, one of those board members identified as a witness in the trial, was once picked by analysts as the eventual successor to Chambers as Cisco CEO.

Analyst Rohit Mehra, who leads network infrastructure research at IDC, said Arista is growing because it has “the advantage of being a relatively smaller, nimble company.”

Arista has fought back by filing an antitrust complaint, accusing Cisco of using sham litigation and its market power to suppress competition and punish customers by charging them higher prices if they opt to buy products from both companies rather than just Cisco.