Plexxi on Cisco on Arista

The bad thing about price differentiation is that it is also the most easily countered. What happens if Cisco announces dramatically lower price-per-port when they spin Insieme in? They don’t even have to beat Arista; they just have to be close enough that the price part of the equation is roughly a draw. If Cisco does this, the most newsworthy element of Arista’s big product launch is largely neutered. That is not to say that Cisco will match on TCO but rather that their go-to-market strategy will effectively counter what Arista had previously launched.

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