Juniper's QFabric Man Defects to Cisco

The executive in charge of the Juniper Networks Inc. (NYSE: JNPR) QFabric project, David Yen, is taking over the corresponding job at Cisco Systems Inc. (Nasdaq: CSCO). (See Cisco Hires Juniper's Yen.)

Cisco announced the move Monday evening. Yen will jump from Juniper's next-generation data fabric to the corresponding products at Cisco, taking over Cisco's Server Access Virtualization Technology Group. That unit includes the Nexus product line and the Unified Computing System (UCS) architecture.

There's more. Yen is replacing a trio of Cisco celebrities: Mario Mazzola, Prem Jain and Luca Cafiero. They'll be shifting to advisory roles at Cisco.

Yen will report to Padmasree Warrior and Pankaj Patel -- who, as of this month, are jointly running Cisco's engineering organization. (See Cisco Cuts Down on Councils.)

Why this matters
This looks like quite a coup for Cisco, assuming Yen wasn't dismissed for setting fire to a Juniper building or something. QFabric is part of a series of ambitious technologies rolled out by Juniper this year, representing a bold leap for the company, and Yen has been the face of the technology since back when Juniper wouldn't tell us what it was. One has to assume Juniper wouldn't let him go easily.

Mazzola, Jain and Cafiero should all be familiar names. They've made a habit of leaving the company and getting acquired back via spin-in startups, as they did with Nuova in 2008 and Andiamo in 2002.

For more
Here's the tale of Juniper's QFabric, formerly called Stratus.

And, from 2008 and earlier, here's the Nuova/Andiamo saga.

— Craig Matsumoto, West Coast Editor, Light Reading