"HPE's sure holding up its end of the bargain. But in tech, love is seldom forever. If HPE sees customers' eyes wandering and sales slipping, surely it will soon be singing a different tune?"
When the sales start to tank expect something like this.
HPE has gone the full Rick Astley with Arista, telling its sales team and partners customers it will never give it up, let it down, run around or desert it. In a hoped-to-be-secret letter to “HPE Sales and Channel Partners” sighted by The Register, and signed by HPE's chief of enterprise group sales Peter Ryan and veep/GM for …
Sometimes it's worth looking at the why and the initial cause. It's a bitter pill to swallow from Cisco, but a bunch of the people leading Arista are ex-Cisco. In a few other cases, Cisco have typically left things to go bang - even after acquiring companies.
I'd expect the reason they're trying to litigate them out of existence is because they know the tech works and there aren't many working options at scale for Datacentre Networking at this kind of scale.
I think Cisco is trying to drive Arista into the hands of HPE. HPE can support the legal challenges much better than the smaller Arista. But if HPE borgs Arista, HPE will destroy Arista like it has managed to do with most other acquisitions. Anyone remember HP's H3C acquisition? That was supposed to be the end-all, be-all networking acquisition that would position HP to take on Cisco in networking.