Arista Networks today added new equipment and services to its Cognitive Campus line aimed at bridging the divide between wired and wireless access for IoT devices at the edge. 

The vendor introduced a pair of WiFi 6 access points that are available for order now and a series of updates to its artificial intelligence-driven CloudVision platform to increase visibility, improve the experience for remote workers, and implement secured access integrations that will be available before the end of the year.

With the COVID-19 crisis dragging on, Arista said the new hardware and software upgrades are primarily targeting “the COVID-era enterprise workspace,” meaning employees stuck at home or those able to safely work at campus locations.

The company recently extended its CloudVision network management platform, which was previously anchored to on-premises deployments, to cloud-based architecture. Prior to that, it updated its multi-cloud and cloud-native networking software, adding an edge component to CloudEOS, which is software that enables cloud networking infrastructure as code across Amazon Web Services, Microsoft Azure, and Google Cloud Platform. 

Arista is taking that a step further now with cognitive capabilities in CloudVision that will detect data anomalies, proactively assess security risks across wired and wireless networks, and track the location of users and IoT devices, according to the vendor. It’s also introducing IoTvision, which functions as a simplified dashboard for IT professionals to gain more insights into the experience and performance of various endpoints.

Security and network access control is getting a boost as well, with the Arista Remote Access Point offering extending to the edge and integrating with third-party firewall vendors, and new integrations with Okta for single sign-on access, Aruba Clearpass for role-based control, and Forescout Eyesight for security posture assessment, according to Arista. 

The company’s sustained push in campus networking is aimed at eating into the market-dominant position held by Cisco in that space. Arista hit its goal of $100 million in campus networking revenue during the second quarter of 2020, but ongoing supply chain constraints tied to the ongoing global pandemic led to a deeper decline in year-over-year revenues and earnings.

Ed Chapman, VP of business development at Arista, said the company is continuing to invest in its campus portfolio with research and development primarily occurring in the automation and analytics areas of CloudVision.

“Single-vendor stacks tend to try to lock customers into proprietary architectures,” he wrote in response to questions from SDxCentral. “The cloud networking principles are driving more open, software-driven architectures. Arista’s Cognitive Campus approach is based on these cloud networking principles and provides customers with an alternative to these legacy architectures.”