Who Is Jayshree Ullal? Arista Networks CEO and Chairperson

Jayshree Ullal is the chief executive and chairperson of Arista Networks, the cloud networking company she has run since 2008. She came from Cisco, where she spent nearly 15 years, and she took Arista public on the New York Stock Exchange in 2014. The board added the chair's role to her job in December 2023.

Arista's revenue grew 58.5% on the year in the quarter to September 2026, and Ullal called it the company's fastest growth since its IPO. Arista's own filings bear that out for every quarter after the one in which it listed. The one exception is that listing quarter, which ended in June 2014 and grew 65.2%.

Jayshree Ullal at a Glance

What Does Jayshree Ullal Do at Arista Networks?

Jayshree Ullal runs Arista as its chief executive and leads its board as chairperson. Arista's April 2026 proxy statementmakes the CEO responsible for the company's strategic direction, the general management of the business and the oversight of senior management.

Because Ullal is the CEO, NYSE listing standards count her as a director who isn't independent. The board says it reviews that combined CEO and chair role every year. It also named Daniel Scheinman as lead independent director, a post that lets him call meetings of the outside directors and raise their issues with management.

Arista's management page also makes Ullal responsible for the company's "thought-leadership" in networking. Her quote led the third-quarter release, so hers was the first comment you read on the numbers. She tied the quarter to Arista's "increased relevance for the generative and agentic AI era," agentic AI being software that carries out tasks on its own.

Under Ullal, Arista completed its purchase of the VeloCloud business from Hock Tan's Broadcom in June 2025. VeloCloud makes SD-WAN, software that links a company's branch offices to its data centers.

Broadcom matters to Arista in a second way, because the 2025 annual report calls it the "predominant merchant silicon vendor" for Arista's switching chips. Merchant silicon means chips bought from an outside chipmaker, and Arista relies mainly on Broadcom for them.

Is Jayshree Ullal Still the CEO of Arista Networks?

Yes, Ullal remains Arista Networks' CEO and chairperson. The company's third-quarter results release in early November 2026 quotes her under both titles, and its management team page lists her the same way. Her term as a director runs to 2027, according to the April 2026 proxy.

Ullal gave up one title in 2025. She was also Arista's President from October 2008 to September 2025, and the company has since split that title between two executives. Todd Nightingale has been President and COO since June 2025, a newly created role he took after running the cloud computing company Fastly as CEO. He's another Cisco alumnus who ran its enterprise networking and cloud business from 2020 to 2022.

Co-founder Kenneth Duda became President and CTO in September 2025. The proxy says the two appointments were meant to "ready us for the next phase of our growth," and neither one changed who sits at the top.

Jayshree Ullal has run Arista for 18 years, through the 2014 listing and every quarter it has reported as a public company.

Jayshree Ullal's Career, From Cisco to Arista

Before Cisco, Ullal held product and engineering jobs at the chipmakers AMD and Fairchild Semiconductor and at the networking firm Ungermann-Bass. She was also vice president of marketing at Crescendo Communications, the company Cisco bought in 1993 as its first acquisition.

Ullal worked at Cisco from September 1993 to May 2008. Her last post there was senior vice president of the data center, switching and services group, a business Arista's management page sizes at $10 billion.

Arista hired Ullal as chief executive in October 2008. The startup had been founded in 2004 and shipped its first products in 2008, its IPO prospectus says. Ullal led it to a June 2014 listing, when Arista sold about 6.04 million shares at $43 each on the New York Stock Exchange under the symbol ANET.

The prospectus called Arista's team "networking veterans with extensive data center networking expertise" and named three people to back it up. All three had worked at Cisco, where Ullal had run the data center business. Founder Andy Bechtolsheim, who co-founded Sun Microsystems in 1982, had run Cisco's Gigabit Systems unit from 1996 to 2003. Founder Kenneth Duda had led that unit's software work.

Arista's April 2026 proxy lists one other public company board for Ullal, at Snowflake, the AI data cloud company. She joined it in June 2020 and chairs its compensation committee, the group of directors that sets the pay of Snowflake's executives.

Arista's management page lists her honors, among them EY's Entrepreneur of the Year in 2015, which she shared with Bechtolsheim. It also names her on Fortune's Most Powerful Women in Business list in 2026.

How Fast Did Arista Grow in the Quarter to September 2026?

Arista's revenue rose to $3.66 billion in the quarter to September 2026, from $2.31 billion a year earlier. In the results release, Ullal called it "another momentous quarter with the highest year-over-year revenue growth since our IPO and record profitability, surpassing even my high expectations."

Her claim holds across the 49 quarters that followed Arista's listing quarter. The other 48 all grew more slowly on the year, and the closest was the quarter to September 2022 at 57.2%. Only the listing quarter itself grew faster, rising 65.2% in the three months to June 2014. That count covers every quarter Arista has reported as a public company, from the revenue lines in its SEC filings.

The table ranks Arista's six fastest quarters of year-on-year revenue growth as a public company.

Ten of Arista's 50 quarters as a public company grew 50% or more on the year. Revenue also shrank on the year in four quarters running, from the end of 2019 through the quarter to September 2020.

We'd call Ullal's claim fair. The one quarter that beat it ended weeks after the June 2014 IPO, so most of it came before Arista was a public company.

The release also gave the company's own outlook for fourth-quarter 2026 revenue, $3.9 billion to $4.0 billion. Arista's shares closed at $169.91 on the day of the release, which came out after the US market closed, and at $170.80 three sessions later.

Can You Trade Arista Networks on Phemex?

Yes, you can trade Arista on Phemex through ANET/USDT, a perpetual futures contract on its shares that went live in September 2026. A perpetual is a futures contract with no expiry date, and this one is part of Phemex's range of TradFi futures on stocks.

Each contract is worth one ANET share and settles in USDT, but you never own the share itself. You can open a long or a short position. Leverage goes up to 10x. Futures use leverage, and a leveraged position is closed automatically if losses reach its margin. Funding, a payment between long and short holders, changes hands every 8 hours.

The shares trade on the NYSE's weekday schedule, and the perpetual keeps trading through the weekend. So the contract can move on a weekend when you can't trade the stock, one of the gaps to learn before trading TradFi futures.

Frequently Asked Questions

What is Jayshree Ullal known for?

Ullal is known for leading Arista Networks from a startup to a listed company that joined the S&P 100 in September 2026. She has been its CEO since 2008 and took it public in 2014. Before that she ran a data center and switching group at Cisco.

When did Jayshree Ullal join Arista?

Ullal joined Arista Networks in October 2008 as chief executive and a board member, the year the company shipped its first products. She came from Cisco, which she had left that May after nearly 15 years.

Who founded Arista Networks?

Arista's IPO prospectus names Andy Bechtolsheim, David Cheriton and Kenneth Duda as its founders, and the company started in 2004. Ullal joined four years later, and Arista's management page calls her its "Founding CEO".

Where did Jayshree Ullal study?

Ullal holds a bachelor's degree in electrical engineering from San Francisco State University and a master's in engineering management from Santa Clara University, Arista's proxy says. Santa Clara's engineering school gave her its Distinguished Engineering Alumni Award in 2013.

Disclaimer: This article is for informational purposes only and is not financial advice. Cryptocurrency trading involves substantial risk. Always do your own research before making investment decisions.