Jayshree Ullal

Jayshree V. Ullal
Ullal in 2014
Jayshree V. Ullal
Born	27 3, 1961
Birthplace	London, England
Nationality	American
Occupation	Chairperson and CEO, Arista Networks
Spouse(s)	Vijay Ullal
Children	2
Website	[arista.com Official site]

Jayshree V. Ullal (born March 27, 1961) is a British-American businesswoman who serves as the chairperson and chief executive officer of Arista Networks, a cloud networking company that designs and sells high-performance switching platforms for large data center, campus, and routing environments. Born in London and raised in India, Ullal has spent more than three decades in the networking and technology industry, holding senior roles at companies including Cisco Systems and AMD before joining Arista Networks in 2008. Under her leadership, Arista grew from a startup into one of the dominant players in high-speed data center networking, deploying 10/25/40/50/100/400/800 Gigabit Ethernet solutions for some of the world's largest cloud and enterprise customers. In 2019, Fortune named Ullal the number one Businessperson of the Year. By 2025, rising demand for artificial intelligence infrastructure had propelled Arista's stock price—and Ullal's personal wealth—to record levels, making her the wealthiest self-made Indian-origin woman in the United States according to several rankings.

Early Life

Jayshree V. Ullal was born on March 27, 1961, in London, England. Her family was of Indian origin, and she spent her formative years in New Delhi, India. Growing up in India provided Ullal with an international perspective that would later shape her career in global technology companies. She eventually moved to the United States to pursue higher education, a path that would set the course for her career in Silicon Valley's networking industry.

Ullal has described her upbringing and early exposure to technology as formative influences on her professional ambitions. Her journey from London to New Delhi and then to the San Francisco Bay Area reflected the broader migration patterns of Indian-origin professionals who became central figures in American technology during the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries.

Education

Ullal earned a Bachelor of Science degree in electrical engineering from San Francisco State University. The university later recognized her as a distinguished alumna, profiling her in its alumni magazine for her accomplishments in the technology sector.

She subsequently earned a Master of Science degree in engineering management from Santa Clara University. Santa Clara University's School of Engineering has recognized Ullal with awards for her contributions to the field and her leadership in the technology industry.

Career

Early Career and Crescendo Communications

Ullal began her career in the networking industry during a period of rapid expansion in the late 1980s and early 1990s. She held an engineering and product management role at Crescendo Communications, a networking startup based in Sunnyvale, California. In September 1993, Cisco Systems acquired Crescendo Communications in a deal valued at approximately $97 million, bringing Ullal and other Crescendo employees into the Cisco organization.

Cisco Systems

Following the Crescendo acquisition, Ullal spent approximately 15 years at Cisco Systems, rising through the ranks to hold senior executive positions. During her tenure, she was involved in the company's data center, switching, and networking product lines. Cisco during this period grew to become the dominant force in enterprise networking, and Ullal played a role in the company's expansion into high-speed switching technologies. Her work at Cisco provided her with deep expertise in large-scale networking architectures and enterprise sales—skills that would prove essential in her later role at Arista Networks.

Ullal's time at Cisco also overlapped with the company's aggressive acquisition strategy during the late 1990s and early 2000s, a period in which Cisco absorbed dozens of smaller networking firms to broaden its product portfolio. Her experience managing product lines that resulted from such integrations gave her insight into both the technical and organizational challenges of scaling networking companies.

Transition to Arista Networks

In October 2008, Ullal was appointed president and chief executive officer of Arista Networks, a company that had been founded by Andy Bechtolsheim and David Cheriton, two notable figures in Silicon Valley known for their early investment in Google. At the time of her appointment, Arista was a small startup focused on developing high-performance networking switches using a software-driven approach that differed from the proprietary hardware models that had dominated the industry.

Ullal's hiring signaled the company's ambition to scale from a startup into a serious competitor in the data center networking market. Her combination of engineering background and extensive experience at Cisco made her a natural fit to lead a company that sought to challenge established players by offering higher-performance, more programmable networking solutions.

Building Arista Networks

Under Ullal's leadership, Arista Networks pursued a strategy centered on high-speed Ethernet switching for cloud data centers. The company's Extensible Operating System (EOS), a Linux-based network operating system, became a key differentiator in the market, offering customers greater programmability and automation capabilities compared to legacy networking platforms. Arista targeted the largest cloud computing providers—companies building massive data centers that required networking equipment capable of handling enormous volumes of traffic at very high speeds.

This focus on cloud-scale networking proved prescient. As companies such as Microsoft, Meta, and other hyperscale cloud operators invested billions of dollars in data center infrastructure, Arista's products became integral to their networking stacks. The company progressively advanced its switching platforms through successive generations of Ethernet speeds, from 10 Gigabit to 25, 40, 50, 100, 400, and eventually 800 Gigabit Ethernet.

IPO and Growth

In June 2014, Arista Networks completed its initial public offering on the New York Stock Exchange under the ticker symbol ANET. The IPO was a milestone that validated the company's strategy and Ullal's leadership. In the years following the public offering, Arista's stock price increased substantially as the company captured market share in the data center networking segment.

The company's growth trajectory accelerated further with the rise of artificial intelligence workloads in data centers beginning in the early 2020s. AI training and inference require massive amounts of data to be moved between servers and graphics processing units (GPUs), driving demand for the highest-speed networking interconnects. Arista's switching platforms were well-positioned to serve this market, and the company saw significant revenue growth as a result.

By 2025, the artificial intelligence infrastructure boom had pushed Arista's stock to new highs. In August 2025, Bloomberg reported that the surge in Arista's share price had pushed Ullal's personal wealth to approximately $6.4 billion, reflecting both her equity stake in the company and the broader market enthusiasm for AI-related infrastructure plays.

Supply Chain Challenges

Despite the strong growth, Ullal has been candid with investors about challenges facing the company. In February 2026, she addressed the issue of memory chip supply constraints during an investor call, noting that Arista was not immune to the broader semiconductor supply chain pressures affecting the technology industry. Her direct communication style with analysts and investors has been noted as a distinguishing characteristic of her leadership approach.

Leadership Style

Ullal's management approach has been characterized by a strong focus on engineering-driven product development combined with disciplined financial management. She has maintained Arista's focus on its core competency in high-speed Ethernet switching rather than diversifying broadly into adjacent markets. This strategy has allowed the company to maintain high profit margins and concentrate its research and development resources on the technologies most relevant to its largest customers.

In a November 2025 appearance on the Tech Unheard podcast hosted by Arm CEO Rene Haas, Ullal discussed her views on technology leadership and the evolution of networking in the era of AI and cloud computing.

Personal Life

Jayshree Ullal is married to Vijay Ullal, who has held senior executive positions in the semiconductor industry. Vijay Ullal served as president and chief operating officer of Fairchild Semiconductor. He later departed Fairchild over leadership differences, according to a 2014 report in The Wall Street Journal.

The couple has two daughters. Ullal has been connected to the Saratoga, California, community; Susie Nagpal, a Saratoga city councilwoman who died in 2010, was described in local media reports as a figure in the broader South Asian community in the region where the Ullal family resided.

Recognition

Ullal has received numerous awards and honors recognizing her contributions to the technology industry and her leadership of Arista Networks.

In 2019, Fortune magazine named Ullal the number one Businessperson of the Year, placing her at the top of its annual ranking of the most impactful business leaders. The recognition reflected Arista's sustained revenue growth, market share gains, and Ullal's role in guiding the company's strategic direction.

Barron's included Ullal on its list of the World's Best CEOs in 2018, describing her as one of 30 leaders with exceptional talent in managing and growing their companies.

Forbes has tracked Ullal on its list of self-made women billionaires, documenting the growth of her wealth in tandem with Arista's stock performance. She has also appeared on Forbes lists of the most powerful women in business.

Network Computing recognized Ullal as one of the top women in storage and networking, highlighting her technical acumen and leadership in a field where women have historically been underrepresented.

Santa Clara University's School of Engineering has honored Ullal with an award recognizing her achievements as an alumna of the university's engineering management program. San Francisco State University and the California State University system have similarly highlighted her as a distinguished graduate.

In December 2025, the Hurun India Rich List ranked Ullal as the wealthiest Indian-origin CEO globally, placing her ahead of other prominent Indian-origin technology executives including Satya Nadella of Microsoft and Sundar Pichai of Alphabet Inc.

Legacy

Jayshree Ullal's tenure at Arista Networks represents one of the more notable leadership stories in the modern technology industry. She took the helm of a small startup in 2008 and built it into a publicly traded company with a market capitalization in the tens of billions of dollars. Arista's success under her leadership helped reshape the data center networking market, demonstrating that a software-centric approach to networking could compete effectively against entrenched incumbents.

Ullal's career has also been cited as an example of the significant contributions of Indian-origin professionals to American technology companies. As the wealthiest self-made Indian-American woman, according to multiple wealth rankings, her trajectory from New Delhi to the CEO suite of a major networking company has drawn attention from media outlets in both India and the United States.

Her leadership of Arista during the AI infrastructure buildout of the 2020s positioned the company at the center of one of the most consequential technology trends of the decade. The deployment of high-speed Ethernet networking for AI training clusters became a major growth driver for the company, and Ullal's strategic decisions to focus on this market segment have been credited with contributing to Arista's strong financial performance during this period.

Within the networking industry, Arista's EOS platform and its approach to programmable, open networking influenced the broader direction of data center design. The company's emphasis on automation, telemetry, and software-defined networking helped accelerate the shift away from proprietary, closed networking architectures toward more flexible, standards-based approaches.

Ullal has served as a visible role model for women in technology leadership, particularly in the networking and infrastructure segments of the industry where female executives have been less common than in consumer technology or software. Her recognition by publications including Fortune, Forbes, and Barron's has contributed to raising her profile beyond the networking industry itself.