SUNNYVALE, Calif. -- Today, Juniper Networks, a leader in secure, AI-driven networks, announced that Raj Yavatkar will be named Chief Technology Officer, reporting to Chief Executive Officer, Rami Rahim. Mr. Yavatkar will be responsible for heading Juniper's technology strategy and for leading and executing several of the company's critical future-focused technology innovations. Mr. Yavatkar is anticipated to begin his employment at Juniper this month.

"Raj is a visionary who has been able to translate a deep understanding of customer and market needs into breakthrough products and solutions for the past fifteen years. I'm truly pleased and honored to have Raj help us in our strategy to change networking for the cloud era," said Rami Rahim, CEO, Juniper Networks.

Mr. Yavatkar brings a wealth of experience and strong technical expertise in cloud services and infrastructure, as well as networking systems and software. He will further Juniper's vision of enabling high-performance, highly automated, AI-driven networks.

Mr. Yavatkar is currently an IEEE Fellow and previously headed the development of Network Virtualization Infrastructure and products for Cloud Networking at Google, delivering network software solutions for Google Cloud customers. As a technology and product pioneer with 45+ patents and 60+ publications, Mr. Yavatkar brings with him a wealth of experience in emerging technologies and how they can be applied to creatively solve the hardest problems in networking and beyond.

Prior to Google, Mr. Yavatkar held leadership roles at VMware and Intel where he pioneered new hybrid cloud product categories and served as the Chief Software Architect to deliver four generations of IXP family of Network Processing Units (NPUs). He also founded a Systems Technologies Lab (STL) and led advanced R&D in technologies such as system security, manageability and virtualization. Mr. Yavatkar received Bachelor's and Master's degrees in Technology in Engineering from the Indian Institute of Technology and a PhD degree in Computer Science from Purdue.

Juniper Networks Inc. (NYSE: JNPR)