After sitting uneasily within Broadcom’s VMware portfolio for nearly two years, the VeloCloud SD-WAN platform has a new home: it has been acquired by Arista Networks for an undisclosed sum.
For VeloCloud customers, the deal should offer ownership stability after years of chopping and changing. The SD-WAN pioneer, founded in 2012, was bought in 2017 by VMware, which itself had been acquired a year earlier as part of Dell’s acquisition of EMC.
VMware, including VeloCloud, was then spun out in 2021 and subsequently bought by Broadcom in 2023. With Broadcom now divesting VeloCloud to one of its partners for a sum rumored to be around the $1 billion mark, the company’s ownership pass-the-parcel appears to have stabilized.
Its new home inside Arista Networks looks positive for the VeloCloud user base. Broadcom bought VMware for its high-margin virtualization, cloud infrastructure, and software technology. Arista, by contrast, is much more of a datacenter and campus networking company known for its leaf-spine 7000 Series datacenter and cloud switches, and enterprise Wi-Fi, unified under the Extensible Operating System (EOS).
To that portfolio, VeloCloud adds SD-WAN and WAN edge, making the Arista Networks portfolio a better fit for customers whose organizations are becoming more geographically distributed. On the face of it, VeloCloud offers some things Arista Networks currently lacks.
Arista Networks’ acquisition press release described the synergy with VeloCloud: “This portfolio of solutions provides expanded choice and performance for Arista customers, enabling global WAN services to interconnect data centers and distributed campus offices, while complementing Arista’s existing CloudEOS routing stack and high-end 7000-series WAN routers.”
What this doesn’t answer is how Arista Networks plans to add newer, security-oriented Secure Access Service Edge (SASE) capabilities to VeloCloud’s older SD-WAN technology. Post-acquisition, it still has only some of the building blocks necessary to achieve this.
Mapping AI
However, in 2025 there is always more going on with networking acquisitions than simply adding another brick to the wall, and in this case it’s the way AI is changing data flows across networks.
“In the new AI era, the concepts of what comprises a user and a site in a WAN have changed fundamentally. The introduction of agentic AI even changes what might be considered a user,” wrote Arista Networks CEO, Jayshree Ullal, in a blog highlighting AI’s effect on WAN architectures.
“In addition to people accessing data on demand, new AI agents will be deployed to access data independently, adapting over time to solve problems and enhance user productivity,” she said.
Specifically, WANs needed modernization to cope with the effect AI traffic flows are having on data center traffic.
Sanjay Uppal, now VP and general manager of the new VeloCloud Division at Arista Networks, elaborated. “The next step in SD-WAN is to identify, secure and optimize agentic AI traffic across that distributed enterprise, this time from all end points across to branches, campus sites, and the different data center locations, both public and private,” he wrote. “The best way to grab this opportunity was in partnership with a networking systems leader, as customers were increasingly looking for a comprehensive solution from LAN/Campus across the WAN to the data center.”
VeloCloud’s VeloBrain and VeloRAIN systems use AI in different ways. These include AI/ML algorithms that monitor SD-WAN traffic, preemptively switching data to better performing network paths, and path optimization which routes traffic from edge to gateway to minimize latency.
This, in effect, addresses two problems, the first is the way that the rise of AI and agentic AI changes network traffic patterns, and the second is finding a way to automate how this change is managed in real time.
Interestingly, Arista Networks recently added similar AI cluster performance and load balancing to its EOS platform, so presumably VeloCloud’s technology will be integrated within this feature set over time.
Brings ‘much-needed clarity’
“I believe Arista’s acquisition of VeloCloud is a strong move that benefits customers by delivering a full suite of network solutions,” commented Herb Hogue of US integrator Myriad360.
“It also brings much-needed clarity to existing VeloCloud users post-Broadcom, reassuring them that the platform will not only be supported, but will continue to evolve.”
For VeloCloud’s current customers, post-acquisition support migration should be seamless, with Arista Networks already hosting the platform’s service status page.
Source:: Network World