Shaun Page, a 13-year Juniper vet, joins the bare-metal SDN vendor.
Big Switch CEO Doug Murray stayed close to home when naming a new VP Worldwide Sales this week -- he hired an alum from Juniper Networks, Murray's former employer.
Shaun Page, a 13-year Juniper Networks Inc. (NYSE: JNPR) veteran, has been hired to lead the SDN company's sales and channel efforts, deepen coverage in key North American markets, set up distribution partnerships, and ramp Big Switch Networks in Asia-Pacific and Europe. (See Defining SDN & NFV.)
Page will also hire additional sales reps and sales engineers, Murray told Light Reading. "As we have products gaining traction, I don't want to be limited by the dynamic of not having enough sales folk."
Page was previously Juniper VP strategic accounts. He joined the router vendor via the acquisition of Unisphere Networks in 2002.
Figure 1: Shaun Page, Big Switch's new VP Worldwide Sales
Page completes Big Switch's top management roster, following a string of hires including Prashant Gandhi, who joined in May as VP of product management, Joe Palazola, VP operations and customer support, hired February 4, as well as Jeffrey Wang, hired in December as VP engineering after stints at Cisco and Brocade. Murray joined as CEO in November. (See Murray Leads Big Switch Into Bare Metal Battle and Big Switch CEO: We're Not for Sale.)
Big Switch is making the transition from an overlay SDN model to bare metal -- what it calls "P+V," for "Physical Plus Virtual." Big Tap, a network monitoring tool, shipped version 3.0 in late January, and a new version is in beta today. The company's Cloud Fabric cloud operations management software is being tested by six customers, with a release date coming later this year, Murray said.
Last week, Big Switch named Rajeev Gupta, former director of worldwide partner development and investment strategies at Juniper Networks, as its first ever global channel chief. The channel is crucial to Big Switch, Murray said.
"When you look at something like SDN, when you're taking innovative software and marrying it to bare-metal switches and open networking devices, you want an ecosystem of partners that can help put the solutions and architectures together," said the CEO.
— Mitch Wagner, , West Coast Bureau Chief, Light Reading. Got a tip about SDN or NFV? Send it to [email protected].
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