Operational Scale: The OEM Model from Arrcus

September 8, 2020 | Cathy Xu

As the hyperscale networking software company, Arrcus is democratizing networking by providing best-in-class software, the most flexible consumption model, and the lowest total cost of ownership to our customers so that they have the freedom to thrive.

At a very high level, there are two general types of consumption models that are available to customers. One engages with Arrcus as a provider of our software only based solutions, and the second model is with Arrcus providing software bundled with a hardware system. For this later model of the software plus the hardware, Arrcus is essentially a direct alternative to what the legacy OEMs provide. Having a robust, highly efficient, and scalable operation capability for the hardware is an essential part of the solution.

In my 20+ years of professional experience, I’ve had the privilege of working for both Cisco and Nutanix, supporting business growth from early stage concepts to annualized billion-dollar revenues over very aggressive ramps. Having the first-hand experiences of what it took to scale operations and to build the overall supply chain for such success, it’s exciting to apply those best-in-class business practices and the lessons learned at Arrcus.

How are operations scaled at Arrcus? Our focus is on the following areas with ongoing continuous improvements to achieve operations excellence:

  1. New Product Introduction (NPI)
  2. Supply Chain Management
  3. On-time Global Support

The New Product Introduction Process

Our goal is to bring new and leading-edge capabilities across a diverse portfolio of both switches and routing solutions to you on schedule and with the highest quality and reliability. We start with understanding your requirements and the overall market needs and also what is available from the ODMs (Original Design Manufacturer) with respect to their hardware product offerings, product roadmap, and any other relevant capabilities their systems offer (e.g. expansion of memory and additional TCAM support). As Arrcus is a hyperscale networking software company with a hardware agnostic solution, we have the ability and provide choice across a wide range of options from multiple ODMs and that too based on a variety of merchant silicon components. Our ODM partners are world class manufacturers and have the scale in all dimensions to support our customer’s needs – many of these ODMs provide ‘white box’ solutions that are simply re-branded for the OEMs and for the cloud titans who have legitimized the use of ‘white box’ hardware across their networking infrastructure. If it’s good enough for the OEMs and the market leaders, its good enough for you as well – the missing link had been a high-performance networking operating system which Arrcus provides with ArcOS. By methodically finding the right combinations of market need and customer need, we have the optimum solutions to rapidly drive options into the marketplace that also provides our customers with supply base diversification. Within Arrcus, we align cross-functional efforts and enable teams across Engineering, Test, QA, Product Management, Customer Engineering, Sales and Operations to effectively plan, validate, and ramp these solutions into volume production. We put measurable, end-to-end processes and exit criteria in place throughout the development lifecycle to bring products from their definitional phase to mass production and volume deployments.

One of the many unique capabilities that Arrcus provides you is that an investment in our ArcOS software-based solutions is extensible to many different hardware platforms from many ODMs based on any merchant component. This supply base diversification is of ongoing strategic value as it essentially allows you to take advantage of the advancements in merchant silicon and optics with ongoing opportunities to lower your total cost of ownership by not being locked into a OEM.

The Right Supply Chain for Long-Term Success

Delivering world-class networking solutions requires an ecosystem of first-tier partnerships with our entire supply base. We build supply chain partnerships with the goal of supporting joint customers and ensuring mutual long-term success on a continuous basis. This is achieved by proactively embracing a strategic win-win approach with our suppliers. Our overall goal is to ensure the supply chain is agile, resilient, provides the lowest total cost of ownership without sacrificing quality and the levels of service on a sustained basis. We ensure alignment on the technology roadmap, business objectives and in general the philosophy of how each partner views their long-term mission. We continuously monitor and improve partner performance on technology, quality, cost, delivery, lead time, and service. The Arrcus expectations are of uncompromising results with the end goal of better serving customer needs with the best overall solution.

“OEM-Level” On Time Global Support from Arrcus

Networking infrastructure solutions are mission critical today. Networking down times are no joke as it can mean lost revenue and in some cases it’s even worse as it can also mean lost profit, lost opportunity, and damaged reputations for our customers. The capability to deliver replacement systems and parts anywhere in the world, sometimes within a matter of hours, is crucial to success. This requires the coordination of a complex mix of services that includes warehousing, distribution, supply chain modeling, transportation, trade compliance, and IT system infrastructure. We have this in place at Arrcus as we partnered with an OEM level service partner who provides the aforementioned capabilities. By working closely together, we provide support to our customers that meet the warranty and service level agreement (SLA).

Network traffic is exploding. The pressure to control costs is unrelenting.  Arrcus delivers the world’s best performance at massive scale—for less. We call it the economies of hyperscale. Alternatively, you can think of it as freedom from dependence on legacy OEM vendors. Freedom that enables your network to thrive. One simple network. One scalable architecture.  One seamless experience connecting billions. Anytime, anywhere. Discover the Power of One with Arrcus.