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Andreas von Bechtolsheim, who co-founded Sun in 1982, built Sun’s first product, the desktop workstation has quit Sun and has launched Arista Networks, a company that is in direct competition to Cisco’s network business.
“Arista Networks has built an ultra-fast network switch that costs one-tenth the price of similar products from Cisco.
A typical switch from Cisco is
rich in features, but has up to 20 million lines of software code and may run on relatively slow processors. Arista breaks all of the major and minor tasks into their own modules that can be updated individually and uses more powerful chips to run it all.” – NYT
Bechtolsheim was an early investor in Google as well, and is known for his ‘midas touch’.
It’s really inspiring to see tech leaders restarting their lives (inspite of all the recession story) – with so much of belief and conviction.
I am wondering how many of Indian industry leaders are ambitious enough to restart their life, after a certain peak? And how many of them are so tech-savvy?
I’d like to correct this story on behalf of Sun. There have been many inaccurate articles published regarding the status of Sun co-founder, Andy Bechtolsheim. Sun can confirm that Andy will remain with the Company as an essential product architect as part of the Sun Systems group; however he will be working with Sun in a reduced capacity as a result of his being named Chief Development Officer of Arista Networks, a start-up company he founded.
Andy will focus his time with Sun on technology development and ongoing systems projects to help drive new product architectures, including X64 servers and storage servers, and will continue to work on key strategic initiatives such as HPC. Andy has made a career of entrepreneurial ventures, and we look forward to his continued involvement with Sun as his passion for innovation has helped to pioneer some of the world’s leading technologies.
All I can say is Padmasree Warrior better watch out. Is Cisco another Motorola in the making?
@Beeba Given the track record of Cisco I can bet if Arista got a good technology with them than Cisco will be the first one to Buy them out .
Of course Prashant, that would be the standard exit/m&a plan. I just think that Andreas has way too much class to sell out to Cisco. I may be totally wrong on that. Time shall tell all.