There are more employment moves afoot at wireless LAN startup Aruba Networks Inc. (Nasdaq: ARUN), albeit not quite on the scale of last week's CEO swap. (See Aruba Swaps Heads.)
Gary Singh, most recently the acting general manager and senior director of marketing for Nokia Corp. (NYSE: NOK)'s security and mobile connectivity division, is joining as Aruba's senior director of product marketing.
Singh has some history in the wireless LAN market. He was at Symbol Technologies Inc. (NYSE: SBL) before Nokia and helped to initially push the concept of a wireless LAN switch onto a market still grappling with standalone access points.
Symbol's original "Mobius" box, which was first unveiled in late 2002, introduced the concept of a centralized wireless box that manages a farm of "dumb" access points. (See Symbol's Cisco Killer?)
"He came from Nokia but was the Symbol guy," says a source familiar with the matter. "He was behind the launch of their original Symbol wireless switch, the thing that inspired Aruba."
Nokia is expected to announce Singh's departure this Friday, although our sources say that he started up at the startup last week.
It's not yet clear why Singh is no longer with Nokia, although the firm's latest quarterly report shows that the firm's enterprise solutions sales fell 39 percent, the one black spot in an otherwise robust quarter.
One vendor source, who preferred to remain anonymous, said "He didn't exactly quit. They quit him."
Neither company has yet commented on Singh's status -- we'll update this story as we hear back.
— Dan Jones, Site Editor, Unstrung, and Carmen Nobel, Senior Editor, Light Reading