Executive director departs after four years to find his next big thing, will join Bain Capital.

February 14, 2017

1 Min Read
Neela Jacques Leaving OpenDaylight

OpenDaylight is looking for a new executive director, now that Neela Jacques has decided to move on. Jacques today said he is leaving to take a short-term position with Bain Capital Ventures and ponder his next move, likely with a tech startup.

The energetic Jacques, a noted wine connoisseur, helped get OpenDaylight through its early growing pains and into an established force in the industry. One of his major challenges along the way was convincing telecom operators and vendors alike that open source was a good approach for them.

At last fall's OpenDaylight Summit, he was able to brag about total committed code contributions for ODL from 872 individuals, a total now of about 900. He also said the total number of code commits for ODL -- at the time it was 61,022, represented two thirds of the total code commitments to open networking and SDN in general, a sign of the project's strengths. (See ODL: Open Source Hastens Software Usability.)

Jacques said on Twitter that he is going to an entrepreneur-in-residence position at Bain Capital Ventures, working with Managing Director Enrique Salem. Phil Robb, the current director of networking solutions at the Linux Foundation, where ODL is based, will serve as interim director.

— Carol Wilson, Editor-at-Large, Light Reading

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