Optics

Doyle had just wrapped his automation-framework talk, and Tyler Conrad was up next. Principal engineer at Arista, Austin, fifteen years split between customer-side and vendor-side.

I went into NFD40 thinking the AI networking pitches were going to be the marketing layer dressed up in new vocabulary, and I came out convinced it’s a different design problem.

Halfway through Tom Emmons’ scale-out segment at NFD40, a fellow delegate looked at Arista’s load-balancing slide and said what most of us were thinking… this could have any vendor’s logo on it.

Cisco showed up to NFD40 selling two different pitches in the same session, and nobody on stage reconciled them.