Jayshree Ullal

Jayshree V. Ullal (born March 27, 1961) is a British-American billionaire businesswoman, president and CEO of Arista Networks, a cloud networking company responsible for the deployment of 10/25/40/50/100 Gigabit Ethernet networking in the data center.

Early life and education
Ullal was born on March 27, 1961, in London into a Hindu family of Indian origin. She grew up in New Delhi, India, and was schooled at Convent of Jesus and Mary, Delhi.

She attended San Francisco State University, where she graduated with a B.S. in Electrical Engineering in 1981. She went on to Santa Clara University where she received an M.S. in Engineering Management and Leadership in 1986.

Early career
Ullal began her career as a senior strategic development engineer at Fairchild Semiconductor and later joined Advanced Micro Devices (AMD), where she designed high-speed memory chips for IBM and Hitachi. In 1988 she joined Ungermann-Bass, where she was director of the company's internetworking business unit.

In March 1992, Ullal joined Crescendo Communications, a maker of Fiber Distributed Data Interface (FDDI) network products, as vice-president of marketing. She helped pioneer 100-Mbit/s Copper Distributed Data Interface (CDDI) products and worked on first-generation Ethernet switching.

Cisco
In September 1993, Cisco Systems acquired Crescendo Communications, marking Cisco's first acquisition and first foray into the switching market. Ullal thereby joined Cisco and began work on the Cisco Catalyst switching business, which grew from its beginning in 1993 to a $5 billion business in 2000. As vice president and general manager of LAN switching in the Enterprise group, Ullal initiated strategic initiatives such as unified communications, IP telephony, content networking and policy networking. She oversaw some 20 mergers and acquisitions for Cisco in the enterprise sector.

By 2005 she became Senior Vice President of the Data Center, Switching and Security Technology Group. Responsibilities included the direction of the modular Nexus and Catalyst Data Center Switching and Application/Virtualization services which saw about $15 billion of direct and indirect revenue. Ullal's career at Cisco spanned more than 15 years.

Arista
In October 2008, co-founders Andy Bechtolsheim & David Cheriton named Ullal CEO & President of Arista Networks, a cloud networking company located in Santa Clara, CA.

Ullal was named by Forbes magazine as "one of the top five most influential people in the networking industry today" for her work at Arista Networks.

In June 2014, Ullal led Arista Networks to an IPO on the New York Stock Exchange under the symbol ANET.

Jayshree was named one of Barron's “World's Best CEOs” in 2018 and one of Fortune's “Top 20 Business persons” in 2019.

Board of directors

 * May 2008 – 2010; Zscaler
 * Oct 2008–Present; Arista Networks
 * June 2020 – Present; Snowflake Inc.

Awards and honors

 * Nominated as one of the 20 powerful Women to Watch in 2001 by Newsweek
 * 2001 Innovator and Influencer Award by Information Week
 * 2005 One of the 50 Most Powerful People in Networking by Network World
 * One of the Top Women in Storage in 2007
 * A Women of Influence award for Security CSOs in 2008
 * A Top Ten Executive in VMWorld 2011
 * One of the seven prominent Indian-origin women in the IT industry, according to The Economic Times
 * Recipient of the 2013 Santa Clara University School of Engineering Distinguished Engineering Alumni Award
 * Ranked #2 in Top 25 Disrupters of 2014 list by CRN
 * Ranked #3 in Top 25 Disrupters of 2015 list by CRN
 * Ranked #9 in the 30 Most Impressive Female Engineers Alive Today list by Best Computer Science Degrees
 * EY US Entrepreneur Of The Year Award Winner 2015
 * World's Best CEOs: Growth Leaders 2018
 * 1 on Masala's MOST INFLUENTIAL Asian Women in America list
 * Named to Barron's “World's Best CEOs” list in 2018 and 2019.
 * 18 on Fortune's Businessperson of the Year for 2019 list.
 * Honored with 8th annual Forbes’ America's Richest Self-Made Women in 2022.
 * Member of Silicon Valley Business Journal's first Power 100 list for 2023.
 * 2023 ET Global Indian award winner

Personal life
She is married to Vijay Ullal. They have two daughters and live in Saratoga, California. Vijay Ullal, now a venture capitalist and investor, was president and chief operating officer of Fairchild Semiconductor from September 2012, until November 2014. She is also the sister of the late Saratoga City Councilwoman Susie Nagpal, who has a surviving son and daughter. Forbes estimates that Jayshree owns about 5% of Arista's stock, some of which is earmarked for her two children, niece and nephew.