Oscar Rodriguez is out as CEO of
Extreme Networks Inc., with Charles Berger taking his place, the company announced Thursday.
Rodriguez, who became CEO in August 2010, is also resigning from Extreme's board. The company's press release didn't specify the reasons.
Among Rodriguez's most important changes was to drop the idea of making Extreme a metro Ethernet specialist. The company had picked that focus a few years earlier, but it was already too late to get a foothold at that point, Rodriguez told
Light Reading in 2011.
"We kind of flattened out and really didn't have best-of-breed perception in the marketplace," he said at the time. "What we did was decide to focus the company away from the wide horizontals of the marketplace."
Part of that new plan was to emphasize Extreme's technological chops. The BlackDiamond X8 has come out as a star performer when it comes to core-switches, and the company has been able to rival
Arista Networks Inc. in low latency, according to analyst reports. Rodriguez claimed Extreme was making headway in market share at the high-end, but its share of the overall Ethernet market remained deep into single digits.
As CEO, Rodriguez had replaced Mark Canepa, the Sun Microsystems executive who took over in 2006 from Gordon Stitt, who was one of Extreme's founders and had been the face of the company for a decade.
Berger's bio says he has been CEO all over the place:
ParAccel, DVDPlay,
Nuance Communications Inc., Vicinity Corporation, AdForce, and Radius.
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— Craig Matsumoto, West Coast Editor,
Light Reading
