Companies are buying more hardware to accommodate the growing amounts of information that flow through their data centers, and Arista Networks Inc. is reaping the rewards.

Shares of the firm, which sells programmable switches that can be customized and automated to streamline operations, soared more than 19 percent today after its second-quarter earnings reported Thursday. Arista brought in revenues of $405.2 million during the three months ended July, up 51 percent from a year ago. It handily beat the average analyst estimate of $360.9 million.

The company beat the market’s expectations on the profit front as well, earning $102.7 million. That marks a hefty increase from the $38.9 million it posted 12 months earlier. Earnings for the second quarter before costs such as stock compensation of $1.34 a share smashed the 95-cent Wall Street forecast and the 53-cent profit Arista generated a year ago.

“We achieved milestones in just about every financial metric as we crossed the $400 million sales mark for the first time,” Chief Executive Jayshree Ullal said on the earnings conference call. “Our new customer additions were higher this quarter, exceeding our normal typical one-a-day acquisition.”

In particular, she added, the cloud computing giants remained the largest contributors to Arista’s growth. Microsoft Corp.’s Azure cloud operation, for instance, constitutes about 10 percent of Arista’s revenue, Ullal said.

The company cautioned that it may not be able to keep up the kind of growth it showed in the second quarter. “This is a spectacular, exceptional quarter,” Ullal said. “Please don’t expect us to do this linearly every quarter, that would be tough, right? I think we just got a great sort of confluence of a lot of good things that happened. However, we think our total available market is still very good.”

Arista’s growth comes despite an ongoing patent dispute with Cisco Systems Inc. that has led to some of its products being taken out of circulation in the U.S. That situation may not change near-term, Ullal said in response to an analyst’s question. “In terms of domestic shipments, we’re doing limited shipments right now,” she said. “And if I were to predict, I would say our shipments will be less linear this quarter and we will be back-end loaded.”

But even though the legal battle with Cisco appears far from over, the company sees its momentum continuing. Arista forecasts revenues of $405 million to $420 million in the third quarter with an adjusted operating margin of about 30 percent. The firm’s encouraging results led several analysts to upgrade their ratings and price targets for its stock.

Arista is gaining ground on the back of a widening industry shift from traditional networking equipment to so-called software-defined products. In an effort to push ahead of the pack, Cisco recently unveiled a new product vision based on a concept known as intent-based networking. The approach involves using technologies such as artificial intelligence to let administrators configure switches simply by inputting high-level operational specifications.

“Clearly, we are witnessing a migration from legacy routers to the state-of-the-art routing use cases for Internet exchange fabrics, additional network function virtualizations for both cable providers and mobile providers,” Ullal said.

Arista is also investing in product development to sustain its growth. In the second quarter, the company introduced new switches based on commodity gear that promise to provide twice the hardware density of proprietary equipment while using less than half the power.

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