Jayshree Ullal, CEO, Arista. Source: Arista

Data center switch giant Arista Networks purchased smaller rival Pluribus Networks in a move that further bolsters its cloud fabric ambitions and provides Arista with a greater presence in the telecom space.

The deal was announced as part of Arista’s second-quarter financial release. Terms of the Pluribus deal were not released, though Pluribus had raised $137 million across seven funding rounds, according to Crunchbase.

Arista CEO Jayshree Ullal specifically touted Pluribus’ work in extending cloud fabric platforms into the telecom space.

“Pluribus is a great acquisition of talent and technology to bring this concept of a unified cloud fabric,” Ullal said during the vendor’s Q2 earnings call. “Arista has been building lots and lots of forms of cloud networking. But in two instances it would be really exciting to see a fabric integrating them. One is in the telco cloud and 5G case. So, we are really excited to forge a new relationship with Ericsson through our Pluribus acquisition.”

Pluribus has been working with Ericsson for several years on powering the telecom vendor’s NFV infrastructure (NFVi) and network slicing platforms, and Ericsson was an investor in Pluribus.

Ullal added that the second instance was in the data processing unit (DPU) space. Pluribus recently partnered with Nvidia to allow customers to apply consistent policies across the network fabric in the data center or the edge down into the SmartNIC/DPU.

Pluribus earlier this year released an updated version of its network platform for 400 Gb/s switches that supports visibility in network flows, including those inside Kubernetes clusters. It also at that time announced support for Dell Technologies’ 400 Gb/s white box switch.

The Pluribus deal also comes on the heels of Arista’s acquisition of SD-WAN and security platform vendor Untangle earlier this year. Arista absorbed Untangle’s operations into its Cognitive Unified Edge product that consolidates multiple security and networking functions into an “edge-as-a-service” cloud-managed platform.

Ullal noted that the Pluribus and Untangle deals included absorbing around 150 employees.

Arista’s recent buying spree also included field programmable gate array (FPGA)-enabled network product provider Metamako, cloud-managed WiFi provider Mojo Networks, network security provider Awake, and SDN vendor Big Switch Networks.

The Pluribus deal was also announced alongside a robust Q2 for Arista. The vendor reported a 49% year-over-year increase in revenues to $1.1 billion for the quarter, which was its first 10-digit revenue quarter. Net profits surged an even more impressive 52% to $299 million in the quarter.

Those results followed what was a record-setting Q1, and Arista’s management is forecasting its second billion-dollar-revenue quarter for Q3.