Jayshree Ullal, President and CEO of Arista Networks, took the spotlight in TheCUBE here at VMworld 2012 to explain once again that despite popular perception, software-defined networking isn’t only sexy – it’s the future of applications (full video below).

There’s an emerging awareness that as much cloud-based, data-driven applications can build business value, there’s a serious bottleneck in terms of application topology. Different network layers with varying latency levels cause a huge drop in I/O between components, causing performance problems and creating massive headaches for the CIO.

But that’s where Arista comes in, Ullal says. With software-defined networking, you can create a “flat” application topology that goes a long, long way towards solving that bottleneck. The advantage of converged infrastructure, virtualization, and all the other good stuff that we’ve been talking about at VMworld 2012, is that every aspect of the stack is programmable and flexible.

That, in turn, enables a whole new breed of application, including big data, web 2.0, high density compute, and so on – applications that wouldn’t have been possible without marrying the higher I/O rate to the scalability and flexibility that modern infrastructure can grant. Basically, programmable, software-defined networking is the glue that holds the next generation of IT together.

And for Arista, the end-game – especially in terms of its partnership with VMware and its recent acquisition of SDN specialist Nicira – is to promote a programmable networking layer that works across clouds and data centers, working towards the multi-cloud future that’s such a talking point around VMware of late. To that goal, Ullal described her company as “the standard” in software-defined cloud networking, bringing the application and network layers close together, and holding up the multi-vendor VMware VXLAN solution on demo at VMworld as proof positive of that.

Naturally, since this is VMware’s show, the aforementioned Nicira acquisition came up repeatedly. Ullal says that the acquisition not only validated Arista’s SDN approach, but that as a VMware partner, Arista has the chance to really innovate around the synthesis of their two offerings.

The real takeaway from Ullal’s talk is that Arista Networks sees itself as an enabler of agile infrastructure for modern, data-intensive apps as enterprises work to figure out cloud, virtualization and big data strategies. And more than that, Arista is positioning itself as an independent player in the networking space, outside the traditional players and their way of thinking.

In other words, networking is sexier than ever.

Hear more of Ullal’s perspectives on the full video from TheCUBE, including use cases, Cisco gossip, and more about Nicira, here: