There is a need to make yearly payments towards the licensing charges of the product.

I rate the product price a seven on a scale of one to ten where ten is high price and one is low price.

I considered Meraki, CentOS, ClearOps, and SonicWall, before choosing Arista. Arista stood out for its flexible security suite with automatic alerts, unlike other options that felt manual and less comprehensive. My past experiences with Arista and as an MSP recommending solutions to clients confirmed its reliability and effectiveness.

We have deployed many enterprise platform switches, depending on the customer's capacity to buy a given platform. We have tested the Huawei switches. For certain protocols and traffic, and especially for video transmissions, Huawei has a good platform. But it's not like Arista, which has the highest one. Cisco has a bit of delay and a lag. From a robustness perspective, you pay a premium for Arista but you get the most from it.

We don't recommend Cisco because Cisco is a very different ballgame altogether. It's more into infrastructure networking data management. Cisco is made for something very different. When you are talking about IoT, Cisco meets expectations.

We evaluated LinkedIn, Cumulus, Big Switch, and Mellanox as smaller players. There are only four major players, Brocade, Cisco, Arista and Juniper, but the three most prominent are Cisco, Arista and Juniper.