Despite COVID-19, Arista Networks remains on track to hit $100 million in campus networking revenue by the end of the second quarter, said CEO Jayshree Ullal. This pushes Arista further into Cisco’s enterprise networking turf — a move Ullal alluded to as Arista’s mission to “disrupt 30 years of legacy and status quo” on the company’s first-quarter 2020 earnings call on Tuesday.

“Arista’s cognitive campus portfolio was launched last summer to address the explosion of clients, users, and IoT devices with software-driven automation,” Ullal said, according to a Seeking Alpha transcript. “We are well on our way to meeting our first year’s $100 million target ending Q2 2020.”

However, while “pleased” with this progress, Ullal warned analysts about expecting too much, too quickly from Arista’s campus networking business. “We must all exercise patience as we cultivate this part of our business.” she said. “It took us more than seven years to build our cloud business to $500 [million], and we believe that our enterprise prospects will take time, especially in this COVID-19 era. We are only just beginning our first year of a five- to seven-year journey to disrupt 30 years of legacy and status quo.”

The networking company beat Wall Street’s expectations for Q1. But, in line with most others in its industry facing economic uncertainty because of the global pandemic, Arista reported a sharp revenue decline from a year ago. This is largely due to supply chain constraints and decreased customer spending because of COVID-19.

For its first quarter, which ended March 31, Arista’s revenue dropped 12.2% year over year to $523 million. Hyperscale cloud providers remained Arista’s largest vertical, followed by the enterprise segment, tier-two specialty cloud providers and financial services tied for third, and service providers in fourth place.

And while Arista historically doesn’t report vertical-specific revenue, “due to popular requests from our analyst friends” Ullal “provided more color” across sectors on Tuesday’s conference call. Cloud titans, she said, comprised about 40%. Enterprise and financial services customers made up about 35% of Q1 revenue. Additionally, service providers and cloud specialty providers comprised about 25%.

Arista also closed its Big Switch Networks acquisition during the quarter. On its fourth-quarter 2019 earnings call, Ullal said Arista would use the SDN startup’s network monitoring tools to boost its DANZ switch monitoring capabilities. Big Switch’s workload monitoring fabric enables centralized packet and flow-based monitoring across public, private, and hybrid clouds. “We are experiencing early traction and complementarity with Arista’s data analyzer DANZ offering and entering into the network packet broker space,” Ullal said on the Q1 call.

Also in line with other tech companies, Arista lowered its Q2 guidance, projecting revenue between $520 million and $540 million.

In addition to reporting earnings on Tuesday, the company also announced a new Arisa SAI (switch abstraction interface) product for customers deploying SONiC software on Arista’s switching platform. The company says this combines the benefits of the open source SONiC operating system with Arista’s own EOS operating system running on Arista hardware.

Microsoft originally developed the open source Software for Open Networking in the Cloud (SONiC) along with Arista, Broadcom, Dell, and Mellanox before contributing it to Open Compute Project (OCP) in 2016.

Arista SAI targets tier-two cloud and service providers. It lets them standardize on SONiC across multiple Arista switches, and thus benefit from automation across their infrastructure. But at the same time, Arista provides integrated software and hardware support so customers don’t need to do it themselves.

This is important because the tier-two providers may not have the networking experience to build an open source networking stack, said John Peach, senior director of technical product management at Arista. “But the key goal is still the same: automate everything, control the infrastructure, and the more common the software is, the easier it is to automate.”

The Arista SAI is already in production on Arista switching platforms with some of the vendor’s cloud titan customers. The product will be generally available on a range of Arista 7050X and 7060X switching platforms in the second half of 2020.