You might remember that another round of WLAN vendor consolidation occurred back in early August with the announcement of the acquisition of Mojo Networks by Arista. If you’re like myself, it seemed a bit odd for a traditional data center player to dive off into the world of access. Especially seeing how at the time, Arista did not carry a single POE capable switch in their product portfolio. So fast forward almost 11 weeks now and let’s look at how things are going………

If you’re still thinking, I’ll save you the trouble. It appears that since making a bit of a ripple in the market following the announcement, still not much has changed with either company outside of a few title & company changes on various LinkedIn profiles. While I understand that these things take time to come to fruition, typically you see a flurry of activity initially with thoughts and ideas of where things could potentially go. I personally was excited to see how Arista would handle the acquisition and what amazing new products and features would come from the unification of two “cognitive networking” companies, but so far it’s been pretty meh. For those of you that tuned into Mobility Field Day 3 (#MFD3 on twitter) you may have noticed as well that the story behind how things were going to tie together was extremely weak at best.

If you missed it, you can find all of the MFD3 videos including Arista here.

So let’s take a few minutes and focus on where we can help find the missing Mojo.

Campus Switching

This one is easy since I already alluded to it earlier. A POE capable 24 & 48 port access switch must be announced & released YESTERDAY. Throw in a little multigig & 802.3bt POE and we’re cooking with fire. The best time to strike is always while the iron is hot, and the iron post Mojo deal is cooling quite rapidly. I had really hoped that this new product would have been ready within a mere day or two of the Mojo deal to instantly create more buzz around Arista. While I’m not a data center guy so I can’t speak to the existing Arista products, I know via other colleagues that Arista has had it’s own mojo in the DC for years. Many even look at Arista as THE leader in the DC.

Machine Learning

Anyone remember Mojo Packets, the free site that allowed you to upload PCAPs for fast diagnosis? If you think they weren’t starting to build learning algorithms dating back to the start of that service, I don’t suggest starting a career in fortune telling. 🙂 While both Arista & Mojo have been involved in the ML field for a while now (I refuse to call it Artificial Intelligence, but that’s for another day) the messaging has been buried a bit lately with other companies such as Mist (Marvis), Cisco (DNAC), & Aruba (NetInsight) making their own pushes into this market segment. Arista already owns the datacenter for many customers, and the amount of information flowing through their cores now could speak VOLUMES to growing what could truly be a phenomenal ML engine.

WLAN Architecture

Many wireless networks today utilize the central forwarding model for multiple reasons, the biggest of these is probably ease of deployment. (Read more about this problem with my friend Lee Badman here-Part 1 & here-Part 2.) There’s no hassling with tagging client VLANs up to every single AP, and no worrying about roaming since the client easily maintains it’s IP across physical boundaries. Mojo solved that problem with their Multiservice Platform that utilizes EoGRE tunnels to save network administrators a ton of time when deploying a bridged solution in place of a traditional WLAN.

Mojo Multiservice Platform has the intelligence to learn the EoGRE tunnel information originating from an AP and dynamically establishes the GRE tunnel with the AP.

With a service such as this, I would be in front of anyone willing to listen to me talking about how we’re making life easier for YOU, the admin. Could you imagine folding this service into the existing DC products and how sweet that would be? No config needed to bring up a WLAN….simply plug in the AP and the network does the rest. Heck I’m not even a used car salesman and that sounded sexy.

WIPS/WIDS

This is really just a token mention since everyone knows the history of Mojo (AirTight) and how good they have been at WIPS/WIDS for a very long time. Just keep doing what you’re doing here Arista and all will be well with the world. 👍🏻

While I truly hope that things start rapidly evolving with the team at Arista, I’m afraid that for now it seems that Arista has indeed lost their Mojo. One might even say that the post acquisition plans weren’t quite as airtight as many believed, but have no fear as there is still time for a resurgence. I truly wish the best for this group, and hope that with all of this silence there is something amazing in the works that will blow us all away.

Thoughts & comments?

-Scott