Fast-growing Ethernet Switch vendor Arista Networks announced plans to acquire Mojo Networks, an Enterprise-class WLAN vendor today.  The deal is expected to close in C3Q18.  This deal douses hopes that Arista may buy other WLAN vendors, in our view.  Mojo Networks is unique in the WLAN industry: (a) it has a different business model from competitors, and (b) as of Aug 2018, it manages more Enterprise-class Access Points using Artificial Intelligence than other vendors.  Arista says that it plans to use Mojo AI in its Cognitive Cloud Networking for Campus initiative.  

Mojo Networks has taken revenue for cloud-managed services and has not taken revenue from the sale of Access Points.  The Access Points are sold by distributors who make a small margin and drop ship them to Mojo Networks customers.  The Mojo Networks revenue from cloud-managed services is significant when compared to other vendors in the Enterprise-class WLAN market.  Additionally, because Mojo's Access Point selling partners charge only a small premium for the hardware, Mojo customers benefit with a lower total cost for the Access Points, than, say, Cisco or HPE Aruba Access Points.

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Tomorrow, 650 Group's Alan Weckel will be a featured speaker on the NBASE-T hosted webinar, entitled "Growth of NBASE-T, Market Trends and Forecast."  In this webinar, we will review Ethernet trends that related not only to Campus Switch ports, but also WLAN, computing and other devices.  The NBASE-T ecosystem continues to expand, including most recently with broadband modem devices.  We are excited about this market and hope you will attend.  

Extreme Networks has been very busy announcing acquisitions lately.  Yesterday, it announced plans to acquire Brocade's Data Center switch business and on March 7, it announced plans to acquire Avaya's switch business.  Additionally, it completed its acquisition of the Zebra Wireless LAN business just last October 2016.
When the two switch acquisitions are completed - some time in the summer of 2017 - the company will be vaulted higher to become one of the major share leaders in switching.  To put the acquisitions into context, assuming the acquisitions had been completed last quarter, using our 4Q16 Ethernet Switch Market Report revenue share figures, the company's share would have been:

• #6 Overall Ethernet Switch vendor worldwide
• #3 Campus Switch vendor in North America
• #5 Data Center Switch vendor in North America

Acquisitions and consolidation in the networking industry have been occurring at a rapid pace over the past few years.  HPE acquired #2 WLAN vendor, Aruba; Arris is acquiring Ruckus plus Brocade's ICX product line, for instance.  It is our view that scale is becoming more important in the networking market as many customers are looking for vendors that support both wireless and wireline  campus technologies.  Additionally, scale matters in the Data Center switch market as well, as Cloud service providers are experiencing a very rapid capital expansion of their services networks.
In 2016 Data Center switch market share leaders by revenue were (alphabetically) Arista, Cisco, Juniper and White Box vendors.  In the North America in the Campus Switch market by revenue, considering Extreme had acquired the switch divisions of Brocade and Avaya it announced in March 2017, market share leaders were Cisco, Extreme and HPE.
Starting this year, we expect that networking customers will get used to seeing Extreme in the top share lists when considering vendors.