The Cognitive Campus Blueprint for Enterprise Networking

The modern enterprise is navigating a profound transformation. The shift to the 'all wireless office' and 'coffee shop type networking', fueled by Wi-Fi 7, AI/ML at the edge, and an explosion in IoT and user devices, has made the network business critical for every enterprise and industry, making network reliability the paramount measure of infrastructure success. Managing disparate domains through siloed operations is unsustainable, escalating complexity directly into operational risk and uncontrolled OpEx.

Our strategy at Arista is to confront this complexity head-on by delivering a consistent operational model that spans every domain in the enterprise, establishing a truly Cognitive Campus that addresses the full spectrum of enterprise use cases.

• Always-On Network: Ensuring continuous service and mission-critical resilience.
• Zero Touch Operations: Driving network management toward total autonomy and OpEx reduction through intelligent automation.
• Zero Trust Security: Implementing deep segmentation and strong policy enforcement across all users, devices, and domains.

Today we are announcing three critical innovations to advance the next generation of campus networking:

1. Solving Large Scale Campus Mobility with Arista VESPA

Campus mobility demands massive scale, but legacy controller designs are breaking under the pressure of extreme user density. This results in unacceptable user experience and high operational risk, directly challenging the always-on network pillar.

Arista VESPA is the architectural imperative, applying high-scale data center principles like EVPN to campus network design. It fundamentally breaks the controller dependency, enabling a single, massive roaming domain supporting over 500,000 clients with high resiliency and fast failover.

The business value is clear: risk mitigation, operational control (reducing proprietary hardware burden, simplifying network design), and future proofing.

Arista VESPA enables design of a single mobility domain across a massive scale campus network

2. AI Ops with AVA Expansion and Agentic AI, Your New Network Assistant 

To realize zero touch operations, we are expanding the AVA^Ⓡ framework with a robust platform approach to Agentic AI. This intelligence is powered by unified data from NetDL^Ⓡ (Network Data Lake) and operated consistently via our common OS (Arista EOS^Ⓡ). This platform enables multi-domain event correlation and conversational troubleshooting, fundamentally reducing Mean Time to Resolution (MTTR), driving down OpEx, and minimizing human error.

Arista AI for Networking Stack

3. Ubiquitous Consistency for Mission-Critical Industrial Edge Deployments

To maintain always-on network resilience and zero trust security across the enterprise, policy consistency must extend to the harshest environments. We are introducing two new ruggedized switches (IP50 Din Rail and IP30 1RU) supporting multi-gig and high-power 90W PoE. This ensures the single-OS operational model and security enforcement are consistently applied to industrial, outdoor, and challenging remote locations, eliminating the traditional operational gap at the edge.

The Road Ahead: A Unified Vision for the Cognitive Enterprise

With these three innovations, Arista VESPA addressing scale, AVA driving automation, and ruggedized platforms extending consistency, we are delivering the next generation of campus networking. This unified approach mitigates complexity, controls costs, and allows our customers to focus on true innovation, not infrastructure management. Welcome to the 2026 era of Cognitive Campus networking!

References:

• Press Release
• Video
• Campus White Paper
• AVA White Paper
• Webinar