Arista launched its CloudVision network management platform into the stratosphere today with a new software-as-a-service (SaaS) offering.

The platform is an alternative to Arista's existing on-premises platform, which is used to provision, monitor, and manage the company's switches and wireless access points across enterprise and campus deployments.

Despite its lofty name, CloudVision has traditionally run on premises on a dedicated server or virtual machine. The company aims to simplify deployments for customers that want to eliminate the operational overhead of managing the platform with a SaaS-based version.

"Traditionally on-premises management is a lot of work," Jeff Raymond, VP of product management and services at Arista, said in an interview with SDxCentral.

Unlike the on-premises version, the new SaaS offering will be delivered as a managed service. Maintenance, tuning, encryption, security patching, updates, and backups will be handled automatically, according to Arista. The idea is to let customers to focus on registering and deploying devices as needed, Raymond explained.

The new offering allows Arista to pre-provision devices as they ship enabling customers to assign policy to them as soon as they are deployed. Arista claims this will help to eliminate configuration challenges and speed the time to deployment.

Arista Focuses On Enterprise, Campus

The platform is designed specifically with the enterprise in mind, as Arista is not targeting the small to midsized business (SMB) market, Raymond said.

He expects the new SaaS-based offering will see strong adoption among large campus deployments, a market that Arista broke into in 2018.

The offering is based on a cloud-native foundation running in Kubernetes clusters to ensure seamless scalability.

"It is designed for elastic resource allocation for more intensive [artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning] jobs and access to longer, historical anonymized data across customers for training models with built-in, state-driven network-wide [network tracking database] nucleus and cognitive inference capabilities," Arista CEO Jayshree Ullal wrote in a blog post.

New Capabilities

CloudVision's on-premises and SaaS platforms are getting some new features with this release too. These include topology tracking, endpoint search features, and analytics enhanced by AI and machine learning.

These tools will help customers gain insights into their networks, and identify and locate hardware on the network, according to Raymond.

While the new CloudVision will initially have feature parity with the on-premises version, the company said new capabilities will be added to the cloud-based offering in the future.

Availability and the Future of On-Premises Monitoring

CloudVision is in customer trials and is expected to begin rolling out to all customers in the third quarter of 2020, according to Arista.

The company's existing CloudVision platform won't, however, be going anywhere. Arista will continue to offer the on-premises platform for customers bound by strict regulatory or data-governance requirements.