If Nortel was looking to make a strategic investment and boost its street cred in the enterprise market, it – and George Riedel – would be begging to invest in Arista Networks (formerly known as Arastra).
The company’s management team include Andy Bechtolsheim, the co-founder of Sun Microsystems, and Jayshree Ullal, a senior and highly-regarded executive with Cisco, who has just been appointed Arista’s CEO.
Arista Networks has developed a network switch that costs one-tenth the price of similar products from Cisco.
Arista’s investors are Bechtolsheim and David Cheriton, a Canadian who donated $25-million to the University of Waterloo in 2005. Bechtolsheim and Cheriton were both early investors in Google. Bechtolsheim apparently gave Sergey Brin and Larry Page a check before Google Inc. was created.
Keep in mind, I’m not suggesting this would be the right move for Nortel or that Nortel has any chance of making an investment in Arista. I’m just thinking out loud about what a good move it would, in theory, be.
For more, check out today’s story in the New York Times.
I don't think that would be a good move as they don't need even more hardware. Interesting that Nortel sold legacy product units to Aastra back between 2000 & 2002.
If Unified Communications is their mantra, then an investment in a Software business is more appropriate, especially if it increases their SOA capabilities. Many telephony capabilities are being de-coupled from PBX hardware and leveraged in a SOA framework to enable telephony capabilities in business applications such as SAP and others. That's the direction for telephony so an investment in this new growth area would be far more valuable.
In An Ideal World….
If Nortel was looking to make a strategic investment and boost its street cred in the enterprise market, it – and George Riedel – would be begging to invest in Arista Networks (formerly known as Arastra).
The company’s management team include Andy Bechtolsheim, the co-founder of Sun Microsystems, and Jayshree Ullal, a senior and highly-regarded executive with Cisco, who has just been appointed Arista’s CEO.
Arista Networks has developed a network switch that costs one-tenth the price of similar products from Cisco.
Arista’s investors are Bechtolsheim and David Cheriton, a Canadian who donated $25-million to the University of Waterloo in 2005. Bechtolsheim and Cheriton were both early investors in Google. Bechtolsheim apparently gave Sergey Brin and Larry Page a check before Google Inc. was created.
Keep in mind, I’m not suggesting this would be the right move for Nortel or that Nortel has any chance of making an investment in Arista. I’m just thinking out loud about what a good move it would, in theory, be.
For more, check out today’s story in the New York Times.
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