For Arista, the end-game -- especially in terms of its partnership with VMware and its recent acquisition of SDN specialist Nicira -- is to promote a programmable networking layer that works across clouds and data centers, working towards the multi-cloud future that's such a talking point around VMware of late. To that goal, Ullal described her company as "the standard" in software-defined cloud networking, bringing the application and network layers close together, and holding up the multi-vendor VMware VXLAN solution on demo at VMworld as proof positive of that. Naturally, since this is VMware's show, the aforementioned Nicira acquisition came up repeatedly. Ullal says that the acquisition not only validated Arista's SDN approach, but that as a VMware partner, Arista has the chance to really innovate around the synthesis of their two offerings. The real takeaway from Ullal's talk is that Arista Networks sees itself as an enabler of agile infrastructure for modern, data-intensive apps as enterprises work to figure out cloud, virtualization and big data strategies. And more than that, Arista is positioning itself as an independent player in the networking space, outside the traditional players and their way of thinking. In other words, networking is sexier than ever. ayshree Ullal arrived at the recent Node Summit representing Arista Networks and stopped by theCube during one of the openings in her busy schedule. The networking exec discussed Node.js, and how it fits in with the overall scheme of networking in the cloud and enterprise IT. JavaScript-based programming language Node.js puts the emphasis on I/O and real-time web, enabling developers to offer their users more functionality, for more work to be done in the backend – the networking layer. This is the point when Ullal took over, and laid out how her company plays into the market. She said that in the past couple of decades, networking was about “connecting the dots.” Now it’s about optimizing apps for the network and all the devices attached to it, a task that requires a better understanding of app behavior and more application-aware infrastructure. Other pundits discussed this topic as well during the conference, and one of the big highlights was the need for enterprises to minimize the gaps between frontend and DevOps – or NetworkOps in this case. Continuing her argument, Ullal said that this smarter network has extended itself to the cloud (if not the other way around), and that Arista has made itself a name in this area, thanks to a number of qualities. The gear the company provides is not cheap – only ‘cost-effective,’ as she put it – but offers a lot of value in terms of more performance and capacity, low latency and small footprints. The crown jewel, however, is the software that powers Arista’s boxes, including the open APIs and other aspects that enable clients to avoid vendor lock-in and setup a more agile environment. There’s also abstraction in the network. According to Ullal, building software that can deal with all the necessary usage parameters is what the Node.js developers that attended the conference should be thinking of