The CTO says he wants to get back to the lab.

Mitch Wagner, Executive Editor, Light Reading

December 16, 2016

2 Min Read
Big Switch Co-Founder Sherwood Leaves for Facebook

Big Switch Co-Founder Rob Sherwood is leaving the company and joining Facebook, he said Friday.

"I owe A LOT to SDN and to Big Switch, but I've made the difficult decision to go back to my roots," Sherwood says in a post to Big Switch Networks ' blog. "I want to be in a lab. I want to look at a seemingly unsolvable problem and prove the naysayers wrong, yet again. Given the success of the technology and Big Switch's current trajectory, I've decided now is the right time."

Sherwood was a member of the Stanford University Clean Slate Lab in 2008, which launched pioneering SDN research. He co-founded Big Switch in 2010.

In Sherwood's blog post, he lists several milestones: Moving SDN from an academic project to commercial technology, deploying it in production and scaling from the data center to the WAN and to installations of up to 100 racks of equipment.

Want to know more about SDN? Visit Light Reading's SDN Technology content channel.

"In retrospect, much of my personal motivation has come from people telling me what SDN can't do," Sherwood says. "As the company and the technology scale up, the naysayers are running out of credibly negative things to say. SDN is no longer a crazy idea. It's a real, viable technology that will forever change the face of networking and Big Switch is leading this disruption."

Big Switch was an early SDN champion, a high-flying startup that was cheered as a company that was going to take down Cisco Systems Inc. (Nasdaq: CSCO). Later, Big Switch became an example of a business principle expounded by Ralph Waldo Emerson ("When you strike at a king, you must kill him"), Omar from The Wire ("Come at the King, you best not miss") and Cercei Lannister from Game of Thrones ("When you play the game of thrones, you win or you die").

Big Switch neither won nor died, but it did pivot, bringing in a new CEO, Doug Murray, in late 2013, and it narrowing its focus to developing fabrics for network measurement and cloud deployment. (See Murray Leads Big Switch Into Bare Metal Battle.)

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— Mitch Wagner, Follow me on TwitterVisit my LinkedIn profile, Editor, Light Reading Enterprise Cloud

About the Author(s)

Mitch Wagner

Executive Editor, Light Reading

San Diego-based Mitch Wagner is many things. As well as being "our guy" on the West Coast (of the US, not Scotland, or anywhere else with indifferent meteorological conditions), he's a husband (to his wife), dissatisfied Democrat, American (so he could be President some day), nonobservant Jew, and science fiction fan. Not necessarily in that order.

He's also one half of a special duo, along with Minnie, who is the co-habitor of the West Coast Bureau and Light Reading's primary chewer of sticks, though she is not the only one on the team who regularly munches on bark.

Wagner, whose previous positions include Editor-in-Chief at Internet Evolution and Executive Editor at InformationWeek, will be responsible for tracking and reporting on developments in Silicon Valley and other US West Coast hotspots of communications technology innovation.

Beats: Software-defined networking (SDN), network functions virtualization (NFV), IP networking, and colored foods (such as 'green rice').

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