- Arista has made two key hires recently, the latest being an AWS veteran
- The company is looking to scale its data center and AI business
- Both front-end and back-end networking are in focus
Tyson Lamoreaux spent more than two decades at AWS, ending his tenure with oversight of its sprawling networks before joining the company’s satellite-focused Project Kuiper team. He’ll now bring his experiences behind the hyperscale curtain to bear for networking vendor Arista in the AI era.
Earlier this month, Arista tapped Lamoreaux as its new SVP of Cloud and AI, tasked with serving the unique needs of its hyperscale customers and growing the business overall. The hire comes at a moment when Arista is facing off with Cisco, Juniper and others to win a chunk of the billions being spent on data center front- and back-end networks in the AI era.
While the blistering pace of AI advances has many on their heels, Lamoreaux told Fierce he’s been through a “hypergrowth” phase a time or two (or really, three) before.
“There’s some experience and techniques and some instinct that I have about how to think about the problem space and where the bottlenecks lie,” he said. “I think that allows me to kind of bring a view on where we should be allocating our time, resources, efforts, and how we can build practices and capabilities internally that are going to scale our business really well.”
So, what is that instinct telling him now?
“We’ve got to help customers get the time-to-first-job as fast as we can. GPUs are incredibly expensive, so capital efficiency’s on their mind,” he said. Lamoreaux also pointed to cost reduction, complete packaged solutions (down to the Network Interface Card, or NIC, level), reliability and scalability as key areas of focus.
When it comes to serving customers, Lamoreaux stressed that what’s good for the goose – erm, hyperscaler – may not be exactly what the enterprise gander needs. Arista needs to be flexible enough to serve both, he said.
Hyperscalers don’t need or want their hands held. But “the worst thing we could do with some of our customers is say ‘here’s the piece parts, here’s the plan and here’s the template, you go and build it,’” Lamoreaux explained.
He added on the product front, being on the leading edge when it comes to things like faceplate density, power efficiency, smaller footprints and speeds and feeds is critical. “Time to market is really everything there,” he said.
Landscape view
As of Q2 2025, Arista had around $2.2 billion in revenue and nearly $889 million in net income. The company already leads the likes of Cisco, Huawei and Ruijie in the front-end data center switch market, according to Dell’Oro Group, and is also a rising star in the rapidly-growing back-end switch arena as well.
Indeed, Arista CEO Jayshree Ullal noted during its Q2 earnings call that “Our stated goal of [$]750 million back end AI networking [revenue] is well on track and gaining from nearly zero revenue three years ago in 2022 to production deployments this year in 2025.”
Front-end switches are used to connect general purpose servers while back-end switches are used to connect accelerated servers. The latter is a relatively new market that emerged with the rise of GPUs and AI clusters, and it is expected to top $20 billion in revenue by 2028, Boujelbene previously told Fierce.
Dell’Oro has predicted that nearly 90 million 800 Gbps and 1.6 Tbps switch ports will be deployed in front-end networks over the next five years, with back-end shipments expected to exceed 270 million over the same period.
All of this is to say, Arista has a massive opportunity sitting in front of it. And it seems to be stacking its bench to capitalize on that.
In addition to Lamoreaux, the company also recently hired Todd Nightingale, former Cisco exec and CEO of Meraki, as its new COO.