Kruep Steps Down From Stoke

Randall Kruep has left Stoke Inc. , handing the CEO job to former Cisco Systems Inc. (Nasdaq: CSCO) exec Vikash Varma.

Kruep stepped down in February, vacated his board seat, but he remains a shareholder. When he left, he was temporarily replaced by Dennis Barsema, a Stoke board member. Barsema was the CEO who took Redback Networks Inc. public, and he went on to lead startups Onetta and Tahoe Systems.

There's conflicting word around the industry as to why Kruep left, but the official story from Stoke is the board just wanted new leadership for this point of the company's life. "The time is right for Stoke to kick it up a notch," Varma tells Light Reading.

Such moves aren't too unusual for startups. Venture investors often bring in new management as a company makes the transition from research toys into real sales.

It's also possible Kruep has moved to another startup. Kruep was sales VP at Redback when he left to run core-router startup Procket. But he got bumped from Procket just after the company announced its product. Procket never did fly, and eventually it got bought on the cheap by Cisco. (See Kruep Leaves Redback for Procket, Procket CEO Resigns, and Cisco to Pay $89M for Procket Assets.)

Light Reading's attempt to contact Kruep wasn't immediately fruitful.

But how about this new guy? Varma was president of P-Cube, a company that did deep packet inspection (DPI) before the technology got known by its initials. After Cisco bought P-Cube in 2004, Varma says he waited out his "obligatory one year" before leaving to help run CloudShield Technologies Inc.

Now he's come to Stoke, which has been revealing bits and pieces about itself after raising $50 million in funding. Its Stoke Session Exchange (SSX) product would let user sessions flip between different types of access, including both wireline and wireless networks. (See Stoke Cashes In, Comes Out .)

"We'll have examples through the course of this year where carriers are using us as a high-performance, high-density edge device with a lot more intelligence than a single-network B-RAS [broadband remote access server] device," Varma says.

— Craig Matsumoto, West Coast Editor, Light Reading