Arista Networks finally made its Big Switch Networks acquisition official, three weeks after SDxCentral broke the news, on its fourth-quarter 2019 earnings call.

“We began Q1 2020 with the close of our third acquisition, Big Switch Networks, an SDN pioneer founded almost a decade ago,” said Arista Networks CEO Jayshree Ullal on an earnings call with investors. “This is a strategic step for us in bringing a strong combination of engineering expertise deeper entry into the network packet broker market and increased software multi-cloud visibility.”

Big Switch’s workload monitoring fabric, which enables centralized packet and flow-based monitoring across public, private, and hybrid clouds, “is a perfect compliment” to Arista’s DANZ switch monitoring tool, Ullal said. Big Monitoring Fabric “has deeper visibility, service nodes, recorder nodes, and monitoring fabric etc.,” she added, according to a transcript.

Additionally, Big Switch’s Big Cloud Fabric (BCF), which automates networking for private cloud platforms and integrates with several vendors’ hyperconverged infrastructure including Dell Technologies, VMware, Nutanix, and Red Hat. BCF, Ullal said, will “be a very important piece, especially for our converged infrastructure partners like Dell Technologies.”

Big Switch and Dell first teamed up on Dell’s open networking product line in 2014, and under a more recent agreement Dell sells Big Switch’s products including BCF under the Dell brand.

In fact, Ullal referenced Big Switch’s Dell partnership several times on the call, and at one point said the acquisition will “strengthen our partnership with Dell and make that stronger.”

It will be interesting, however, to see if Big Switch and Dell open networking customers share Ullal’s enthusiasm. Big Switch has long railed against proprietary vendors including Arista and Cisco, and its open networking product line with Dell specifically targets these two.

“Open networking, when you look at the market, is obviously the fastest growing part of networking,” said Douglas Murray, president and CEO of Big Switch Networks, in an earlier interview with SDxCentral. “I believe this continues to be quite eye opening for the incumbents, seeing that this is really starting to take hold in the market.”

Meanwhile, Arista’s Q4 revenue declined and took a big hit from cloud and service providers sales. Executives didn’t sound very optimistic about a quick turnaround in early 2020. For the quarter, Arista reported $552.5 million in revenue, a 15.6% drop from a year ago. The company’s full-year 2019 revenue hit $2.41 billion, an increase of 12.1% compared to fiscal year 2018.

Arista doesn’t report revenue specific to its verticals. Instead, it ranks them, and large cloud providers are typically Arista’s strongest customer base. This was the case in Q4, with “cloud titans” making up the largest segment, enterprise coming in second, financials in third, tier-two cloud specialty providers in fourth, and service providers in fifth. On top of disappointing cloud titan sales, “both service providers and tier-two cloud providers have been slow for us,” Ullal said.

“2019 has been a challenging year for our cloud business with significant volatility and an overall muted demand picture,” Arista CFO Ita Brennan added. “As we look forward to 2020, we believe this trend continues with demand from this part of the business being flat to down on a year-over-year basis. This trend, combined with tough year-over-year revenue comparisons due to the recognition of $118 million of product deferred revenue in the first half of 2019, will likely result in a meaningful decline in cloud revenue for 2020.”

When asked later in the call to clarify what they meant by “meaningful decline” in cloud revenue and “sluggish” service provider sales, Ullal forecast “flat to double-digit down” cloud titan revenue and said the definition of sluggish means “it’s not that bad.” When it comes to service provider revenue, “I think the worst was last year,” she said. “So it’s bottomed out, and it can only get slightly better. But we’re not holding of breath or anything, but we believe it can’t get worse.”