Q&A: The Partner Case For More Bare-Metal Switches

Could a networking company like Cisco shift their hardware strategy to win the software battle?

Cisco's not really a silicon company, whereas (for) people like Broadcom, this is what they do for a living. They're a silicon company and they do a phenomenal job of it.

As the world transitions to bright-box or bare metal networking, it doesn't mean that Cisco can't be the software winner. We want to be the software winner. We're going to try as hard as we can but for Cisco or Arista, everybody has an equal shot at winning that position. But it's pretty obvious that the supply chain part of it has to change.