By Don Clark
Cisco Systems Inc. on Friday sued Arista Networks Inc., accusing
the fast-growing competitor of infringing on an array of Cisco
patents and copyrights associated with its networking
equipment.
The accusations are contained in separate complaints against
Arista, a company led by former Cisco executives that went public
six months ago and sports a market valuation of nearly $5
billion.
Cisco alleged that Arista is infringing 14 patents covering
important features of Cisco products. The company also accuses
Arista of extensively copying other Cisco intellectual property,
including copyright material from user manuals and more than 500
commands used to configure networking equipment. The complaints
were filed in federal court in the northern district of
California.
Jayshree Ullal, a former Cisco senior vice president who is
Arista's chief executive, said the company had not yet received
Cisco's formal complaints.
But she added: "I am disappointed at Cisco's tactics. It's not
the Cisco I knew."
Mark Chandler, Cisco's general counsel, said he had not
authorized a patent-infringement suit in 11 years, though dozens of
companies have been founded by former Cisco personnel. But Arista's
actions are "so blatant and brazen," he said, a failure by Cisco to
respond would encourage others to take the company's intellectual
property.
"At some point, someone gets in your face to the point that it's
important to take action," Mr. Chandler said.
The dispute emerges at a time when Cisco has struggled to boost
its revenues, particularly in sales of routing and switching
products to corporate customers. Cisco last month said switching
revenue rose 3% in its first fiscal period after several quarterly
declines, while total revenue grew just 1%.
Arista, by contrast, has benefited by marketing its own
switching systems to Wall Street customers and Web services that
have been among the most active hardware buyers in recent years.
Its revenue in the third quarter grew 53%, according to a November
report.
The 10-year-old company was co-founded by Andy Bechtolsheim, an
engineer and entrepreneur known for designing the first computers
sold by Sun Microsystems Inc. and as one of the first investors in
Google Inc. He also worked at Cisco after the company bought a
startup led by Mr. Bechtolsheim, who is named as an inventor on
some of the patents asserted by Cisco in the litigation.
In its copyright complaint, Cisco alleges that Arista copied
verbatim sections of text from Cisco documents, in some instances
including grammatical errors contained in the originals. Other
parts of the complaint accuse Arista of employing the same strings
of text as engineers use to configure Cisco hardware, using a
programming approach known as a command line interface.
Mr. Chandler said Arista has its own interface, but it chooses
to use Cisco's because customers are more familiar with it.
Whether copyright law applies to other programming elements
called application programming interfaces, or APIs, is a key issue
in litigation filed in 2010 by Oracle Corp. against Google. The
Internet company has asked the U.S. Supreme Court to overturn an
appeals court ruling in Oracle's favor.
Mr. Chandler said that ruling supports Cisco's position against
Arista, but he believes Cisco would prevail even if the ruling were
overturned because of differences in the cases.
The Cisco complaints ask for unspecified damages. But Mr.
Chandler said the main goal is an injunction that would bar Arista
from selling products that violate its intellectual property. "We
want them to stop," he said.
Cisco filed a high-profile patent suit in 2003 against Chinese
rival Huawei Technologies Co., a case that was later suspended by
agreement between the companies.
Write to Don Clark at don.clark@wsj.com
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