Recently, I was talking with a friend that works at a large university about what solutions they are exploring to refresh their Wi-Fi. They have various vendors between their stadium, and campus. He was telling me that he is interested in another vendor, but his team has an opposing idea. They want to test out Arista to keep it all in house and have one Ai agent.
The university is running Arista switching and routing and find it to be of the highest quality. Since my first Mobility Field Day 8, I’ve heard that Arista has the best switching on the market. Their integration of EVPN-VXLAN into their APs has long been of interest for me. The ability to use any Arista switch as a VXLAN tunnel to an AP has some compelling use cases. It seems that others have followed Arista’s ideas as often happens when someone has a leading idea.
I have yet had an opportunity to play with Arista’s Wi-Fi or switching in my day job. I get to play with pretty much everyone else but not Arista. That discussion with my friend got me thinking after attending Mobility Field Day 14. At MFD14 Arista founder Kenneth Duda gave a masterclass on how Arista is building their AI agent, AVA, into all their product line.
With the AI-fication of everything, everyone’s AI seems to move chess pieces around like a magical Mechanical Turk.
When it comes to AI, what is actually happening seems like a Mechanical Turk to me. I can code with Claude Code and kind of know what is going on, but what Ai is truly doing is a lot of statistics and math. Kenneth Duda helped simplify what is actually happening with Ai to reveal the story behind the Mechanical AVA Turk. Pulling back the curtain is something others are not as open to share about their Ai agents.
Mojo Networks
For those who don’t know much about Arista’s Wi-Fi products, it came from the acquisition of Mojo Networks by Arista. Much like Juniper did when they purchased Mist, Arista wanted to build a full stack, and Wi-Fi was the product line they were missing. That is an intriguing idea to me. Do we have another Juniper on our hands with Arista?
Mojo Networks was a small player in the market and many said it was more of a small business product line than a full enterprise grade contender. It isn’t that way anymore with Arista behind them.
AVA AI
At MFD14, Arista’s founder, Kenneth Duda, got to work showing how their AI agent, AVA, works through mapping it all out on a digital whiteboard. He discussed how AVA can integrate into so many pieces. It kind of felt like the early days of Amazon Alexa with skills and learning integrations from different 3rd party partners.
Humans and Agentic AI
But where Arista’s AI Agent really shined was when we got to the whiteboarding. The biggest take away that makes Arista stand out against other LLMs and AI Agents being built into Wi-Fi networking.. is the human element.
It is concerning how much the human element is excluded from the process. Are we going full self-driving or do you want to keep the human element involved in the process? That is where Arista and AVA shines.
Claude Code can build an app but it creates a lot of Ai Slop, as many apps being built for the iPhone are being described. Is AVA just another Ai Slop bolted onto a Wi-Fi product line?
Kenneth Duda said, the goal is to not to keep the human out of the system, but to help engineers use Ai tools and be involved in the Ai process. This is a huge distinction, compared to everyone else.
Ken continued by saying that with LLMs no one knows what AI is actually doing. Arista wants to keep AI under human control and not the other way around. Another known Tech Field Day events delegate, Jim Czuprynski, commented the following in chat when Arista mentioned this huge difference:
So is what the industry needs a more human view and less technical over reach? That is the question and where Arista is taking AVA. What that fully means is yet to be fleshed out. But at least Arista is calling out something we all know. Networking Ai is doing some magic under the table in the form of an Ai Mechanical Turk.
I have yet had an opportunity to test out Arista’s networking gear, so I can’t talk to if they are better than Cisco or Aruba in regards to my friend’s problems. I’ve heard other’s opinions and have my reservations. But I can discuss about how LLMs are called a magical mechanical turk and help show that there is a benefit to keeping the human in the mix. I like the idea of self-driving, but do I trust the network to make the right decision?
That is where Arista is focused and is probably their biggest selling point. Arista is about quality. Quality in presentations, quality in software, quality in switching, quality in AI, quality in the human element. All starting at the top with founder Kenneth Duda.
I highly recommend anyone thinking about “Quality and Wi-Fi Networking” to watch Ken Duda discuss how Arista is building AVA into their product line. I also suggest you go watch all the Arista videso from MFD14.