Arista Networks Acquires VeloCloud from Broadcom, Strengthening AI-Driven SD-WAN Capabilities

Arista acquires VMware's VeloCloud SD-WAN outfit

It's 2025 so even this networking deal is about AI, which is apparently about to change wide area networks Broadcom has sold VeloCloud, the software-defined WAN business VMware acquired in 2017, to Arista. A post about the acquisition written by Arista CEO Jayshree Ullal opened by revisiting the reason software-defined (SD) WAN was hot back in 2017 when VMware acquired VeloCloud - people were tired of paying for expensive dedicated MPLS circuits and SD-WAN enabled the creation of cheaper virtual WANs. Ullal's post characterizes traffic flows on the WANs of the late 2010s as "simple, involving many-to-one conversations from many distributed users to a few centralized data sources." These days, WANs likely connect to many sources of data - Ullal mentions "a laptop or smartphone, a house, an airplane, or any other location on the move" in addition to "a central company data center, the public cloud, or distributed branch office sites." That proliferation means WAN traffic patterns have changed. The CEO also feels that AI agents will bring more change to WANs as they roam around networks looking for data in many locations. She reckons buying VeloCloud will help Arista to handle this new world of WANs. "VeloCloud's secure, AI-optimized cloud WAN portfolio will provide seamless, application-aware solutions to connect customer sites of any type, complementing Arista's leading data center and campus wired/wireless portfolio," she wrote. VeloCloud founder Sanjay Uppal used his LinkedIn account to comment on the acquisition by remarking that his company - which he continued to lead as a Broadcom senior vice president - recently "realized that enterprise app architectures were changing once again with the emergence of a distributed agentic framework across the distributed enterprise." While he praised Broadcom's stewardship of VeloCloud, Uppal said "The best way to grab this opportunity was in partnership with a networking systems leader as customers were increasingly looking for a comprehensive solution from LAN/Campus across the WAN to the data center." "When Arista, a close partner of Broadcom, proposed that VeloCloud become a part of their leading networking portfolio, we knew that this was the right fit," he wrote. Neither Broadcom nor Arista have mentioned how much money will change hands. VMware acquired VeloCloud to grow its network virtualization business, but the SD-WAN company was an uneasy fit because it built and sold hardware. Arista's business is built on boxes, so it will find that part of VeloCloud's business easier to digest. VMware has gone all-in on private clouds, so probably won't miss its SD-WAN sideline. Broadcom may, as it built a Secure Access Service Edge by combining products from VeloCloud and Symantec. ®

Arista acquires VeloCloud from Broadcom and Todd Nightingale joins as president and COO - SiliconANGLE

Arista Networks Inc. today announced it will acquire VeloCloud SD-WAN from Broadcom Inc., a deal that puts to bed ongoing reports that surfaced about six weeks ago. The purchase, for which a price wasn't given but was reportedly about $1 billion, gives Arista a best-in-class software-defined wide-area network solution to complement its current high-end 7000 series router which run the Cloud EOS operating system. VeloCloud has a wide range of cloud-managed SD-WAN offerings with integrated security enabling Arista to reach another tier of customer. VeloCloud was one of the pioneers in SD-WAN and has found a wide range of use cases for its products that have traditional connectivity but also WiFi and 5G for WAN access. At previous MWCs, VeloCloud demonstrated how its SD-WAN was being used to connect emergency vehicles. For Arista, VeloCloud fills a gap in its portfolio, enabling it to offer end-to-end networking solutions to a wider range of customers. The company was founded on offering high-end switching for data centers and high frequency trading. From there it expanded, added Wi-Fi with the acquisition of MoJo Networks and then added a line of campus switches Its high-end routers are used by cloud providers, service providers and large enterprises but branch office connectivity was a gap. Now it adds one of the leading SD-WAN firms and can better compete when an end-to-end solution is required. Gartner Inc.'s last SD-WAN Magic Quadrant had VeloCloud as one of six leaders. Also, VeloCloud beings integrated firewalls and other security features to add to Arista's threat management, network detection and response, and network access control capabilities. Arista isn't known as a security vendor but has quietly built a strong portfolio. Though it's likely to not lead with security, it has a broad enough set of capabilities to address the emerging trend of integrating security in the network. With respect to artificial intelligence, VeloCloud current offers VeloRAIN (Robust AI Networking) and VeloBrain. The former uses AI to improve the security and performance of distributed AI workloads (VeloCloud for AI). The latter, announced earlier this year, is an AI operator to help network engineers better manage their environments (AI for VeloCloud), addressing both sides of the AI coin. Arista was early out of the gates with networking for AI as its high-performance products are ideally suited for the rigors of AI. It also offers autonomous virtual assistant or AVA for AI operations. The most obvious question with this acquisition is how Arista integrates VeloCloud with its products. One of the key differentiators for Arista has been that EOS is the single operating system that powers all its products. This has enabled everything to be managed through CloudVision and for the Arista DataLake to be the single source of data for AI operations. Though I have not talked to the company about this, history shows that when it does make acquisitions, it eventually ports the products to EOS. However, VeloCloud is much bigger than MoJo, Awake, BigSwitch and other purchases and has a massive installed base, so the company will need to tread carefully here and ensure customer disruption is minimized. Arista tends to err on the side of caution when it comes to its customers, so my assumption is Arista will keep VeloCloud on its own operating systems and gracefully migrate over time. For VeloCloud, this ends the long quixotic journey for a company that never quite fit inside the company that owned it. When VeloCloud became part of VMware, it was known as one of the leaders in SD-WAN. However, then-CEO Pat Gelsinger was very aggressive in his tone of how with VeloCloud and Nicira would disrupt network engineers, which obviously wasn't popular with the audience of people buying the products. VMware dropped the VeloCloud branding and, despite having some of the best technology in SD-WAN, that opened the doors for competitors to start taking share. Eventually, VMware brought back the branding of "VeloCloud by VMware," which had better appeal to networkers, removing a big barrier in the sales process. When the Broadcom acquisition took place and the strategy was to go all-in on VMware Cloud Foundation, it became obvious VeloCloud would need to find a new home. At MWC25, the booth was branded VeloCloud by Broadcom, but in my conversations with executives it seemed that was temporary, although removing the VMware association did seem to help with the brand. With Arista, VeloCloud finds itself with a company that has one motivation, and that's to make the best-performing networking products. That's a win for VeloCloud but more importantly its customers. This adds to a busy week for Arista. The Gartner Magic Quadrant for Wired/Wireless LAN dropped, and the company was rated the highest in ability to execute for companies in the Visionaries Quadrant. Adding to its current portfolio of products, Arista this week announced the following new products: One final piece of news: Todd Nightingale (pictured) has joined Arista as president and chief operating 0fficer. Nightingale most recently served as chief executive of Fastly Inc., but prior to that he was executive vice president and general manager of Cisco Systems Inc.'s Enterprise Networking and Cloud division. Nightingale joins a stacked Arista leadership team that includes Ken Duda, Mark Foss, John McCool and, of course, CEO Jayshree Ullal. Nightingale's experience at Meraki, one of the early cloud networking vendors focused on ease of use, will be invaluable to Arista as it looks to broaden its appeal to a wider range of customers.