Next time a Tesla Roadster blows past you on the 101, take a closer look: it might be Arista CEO Jayshree Ullal.

"I've taken to this thing in a huge way for a number of reasons," Ullal said of her Tesla in remarks Wednesday at the Big Telecom Event in Chicago. "The acceleration is unbelievable."

Ullal's speed-demon remarks all tied back into her pitch for Arista, of course.

"We are in the middle of a radical change in the networking industry, and the car industry which seemed like it was dying is also transforming — transforming from gas to electric and from driver or chauffeur-driven to self-driving cars," she said.

"Self-driving networks that are automated and programmable are truly making networking fun again."

Ullal sees three distinct ways to approach network automation: the D.I.Y approach involving custom software favored by hyperscale titans such as Google and Facebook; the DevOps approach using existing tools stitched together with scripts; and an out-of the box turnkey approach.

That turnkey approach, says Ullal, is what's missing in the commercial market today. Achieving it, she added, will require open software-defined networking standards and industry collaboration.

"We all have to break old habits and go beyond the CLI," Ullal said in a dig against Cisco’s command line interface. "The answer to that is open software, open operating systems, and coming together as a community."