Arista Networks Goldman Sachs Communacopia + Technology Conference 2026

Great to be here after a long weekend.

Yeah. Thanks, Michael. We are so excited about what's happening in networking, because the network is absolutely the lifeblood of so many different kinds of operations. It connects everything together. When the network ain't working, ain't nothing working. It's super reliability critical, and we feel like our opportunity to continue to grow and expand in that space is just really exciting to me. With regard to your question about how do we invest, one of the great things about our business is we don't have to think about it in those terms, right? It's not sort of a, well, do we do it, invest here? Do we invest there? It's like, no.

What we do is we work very closely with the world's most sophisticated hyperscaler operators, customize solutions for them, bring in the newest technologies. I think you see that now with XPO, liquid-cooled optics, and that sort of thing, get all that working at scale. Those investments that we make in the hardware and the software, the technology, naturally flow across the ecosystem into the broader markets, the specialty operators, ultimately into the enterprises. We are investing along the entire chain there. It is not a sort of A or B decision.

Yeah, the only thing I would add to Ken's comments, which absolutely resonate with me in the sense of how we approach the company, it is a benefit and it is not confusing for a capital allocation strategy or investment strategy when you are just pure play networking, right? We love all those children equally because they are all important in a networking portfolio. If you think about our guide for this year being $12.6 billion, roughly 40% growth, that is a lot of absolute dollars added if you maintain 8%-10% of R&D to revenue for Ken and his team. We are super excited, and we have room for all of those things to be invested in.

Yeah, sure. Jayshree and I were super excited to raise the guidance by over $1 billion in the last call. I would say two things were true to make that a comfortable position for us. The first thing was, if I go back to the Q1 earnings call, back to the scenario that no one thought was popular but was definitely needed, talking about supply chain constraints across the industry. We got more comfortable with supply chain. We leaned into purchase commitments. We had some of our vendors rally that we needed to rally. We had to make sure the team inside the company was on their A game to make sure this happened. Supply chain was something we were comfortable with, Michael.

The second thing is, by the time you get to that August timeframe, we have two quarters of PO transactional visibility, so we could see through to the end of the year. Supply chain improvements with PO visibility timing, those two things came together to give us confidence. I think if you were to look at what could give us even more upside to that guide raise, it is that the supply chain eases up even more. I think that we are not out of the woods. I do not think anyone in the industry is out of the woods for supply chain constraints. But if that gets a little bit more opened up, there could be some potential for upside.

I do not know if it is one, because it is different customers have different things. But it is everything from some of the peripherals to some of the main things, main components that come into it. So, we have agreements on chips and memory, but there is PCBs and there is sometimes there is power cables and things like that just kind of whack-a-mole through the year. So we will just keep our eye on it.

Yeah. The situation with open source NOS is that it may be open source, it is not free. It takes a deep technical expertise to actually get all the components together, assemble them into an image, and get that to actually work on the hardware platforms and use cases of interest. I'm not foreseeing any deep penetration there outside of a handful of hyperscaler operators who I don't believe are even saving a single dollar here, honestly. What they're gaining is multi-sourcing of their software environment. They cannot accept the operational risk of being beholden to a single vendor. That's the core driver, I believe, for what's happening in that part of the market. The competitive differentiation of EOS is very strong in the hyperscaler use cases.