Jayshree Ullal


Jayshree V. Ullal is an American billionaire businesswoman, president and CEO of Arista Networks, a cloud networking company responsible for the deployment of 10/25/40/50/100 Gigabit Ethernet networking in the data center.

Early life

Ullal was born in London, and raised in New Delhi, India through her schooling years. She eventually attended San Francisco State University where she graduated with a B.S. in engineering. She went on to Santa Clara University where she received a master's degree in engineering management.

Career

Ullal began her career with engineering and strategy positions at Advanced Micro Devices and Fairchild Semiconductor. She was director of internetworking products at Ungermann-Bass for four years before joining Crescendo Communications. At Crescendo, Ullal became vice president of marketing, working with 100-Mbit/s over copper, the first CDDI products and first generation Ethernet switching.

Cisco

In September 1993, Cisco Systems acquired Crescendo Communications, marking Cisco’s first acquisition and foray into the switching market. Ullal joined Cisco and began work on the Cisco Catalyst switching business, which grew from its beginning, in 1993, to a $5 billion business in 2000. As vice president and general manager of LAN switching in the Enterprise group, Ullal was responsible for unified communications, IP telephony, content networking and policy networking. She oversaw some 20 mergers and acquisitions for Cisco in the enterprise sector.
Ullal was eventually named Senior Vice President of Data Center & Switching, reporting to John Chambers. Responsibilities included the direction of the modular Nexus and Catalyst Data Center Switching and Application/Virtualization services which saw about $15 billion of direct and indirect revenue. Ullal’s career at Cisco spanned more than 15 years.

Arista

In October 2008, co-founders Andy Bechtolsheim & David Cheriton named Ullal CEO & President of Arista Networks, a cloud networking company located in Santa Clara, CA.
Ullal was named by Forbes magazine as "one of the top five most influential people in the networking industry today" for her work at Arista Networks.
In June 2014, Ullal led Arista Networks to an IPO on the New York Stock Exchange under the symbol ANET.

Awards and honors

She is married to Vijay Ullal, they have two daughters, and live in Saratoga, California. Vijay Ullal was president and chief operating officer of Fairchild Semiconductor from September 2012, until November 2014.