
Douglas Gourlay is the vice president of marketing at Arista Networks, a privately held pre-IPO networking ompany based in Menlo Park, California and the leader in 10Gb Ethernet switching for the data center. Gourlay is responsible for global marketing, product management, strategic alliances and corporate communications. Since joining Arista the company’s portfolio has expanded to include virtual, Gigabit, and modular switching platforms and has been awarded the NetworkWorld ClearChoice award for Best 10GbE Top-of-Rack switch, the Best of Interop Award in the Infrastructure Category, and the Best of Interop: Overall Best in Show Award. Prior to joining Arista, Gourlay was the vice president of Cisco’s Data Center Solutions Group.
As the vice president leading Cisco’s Data Center Solutions Group, Gourlay defined and executed Cisco’s global strategy for data center, virtualization, and cloud computing solutions. This included the Nexus and Catalyst Data Center Switches, Application and Server Load- Balancing, Storage Networking, Blade Switching, and Wide-Area Application Services product families and their IT solutions. Under his leadership, Cisco’s data center segment grew from a nascent business to over $6B in annual revenue.
Since 1998, Gourlay has led and contributed to numerous hardware, software, and systems architecture developments across Cisco. He has served as senior director of product management leading the initial development of the Nexus Family of Data Center switches,director of product management for the Catalyst 6500 Series of LAN Switches during the development and productization of the Supervisor 720, and led product management forCisco’s Application Delivery product family. Gourlay has over 25 patents in networking technologies. Prior to Cisco, Gourlay worked as an industry consultant and served as a US Army Infantry Officer.