DÜSSELDORF -- SDN & OpenFlow World Congress -- Alcatel-Lucent is losing one of its key NFV executives at the end of this year with the departure of Dor Skuler, vice president and general manager of the CloudBand Business Unit.
Skuler tells Light Reading that he is leaving Alcatel-Lucent (NYSE: ALU) to do "something new and exciting," but he's not revealing any details just yet. But it appears it isn't competitive to what Alcatel-Lucent is doing (and it's not a new role within the vendor), as he is managing a handover to Ron Haberman, who has just rejoined AlcaLu after founding and running cloud games specialist CiiNOW.
Skuler has played a key role in taking CloudBand from its initial unveiling as a cloud networking management platform in late 2011 to becoming one of the key systems underpinning major telco NFV developments in the industry. (See AlcaLu Unveils Its Carrier Cloud Play and Analyst: AlcaLu Could Have a Cloud Hit.)
Only this week it was announced as a key part of KT Corp. 's R&D plans and has been cited by multiple other Tier 1 operators, such as Deutsche Telekom AG (NYSE: DT) and Telefónica SA (NYSE: TEF), as a key component in virtualized telco networking. 711411 709669 708857
Technology is certainly an enabler in this business, but the people behind the technology are just as important. Skuler is respected and well liked in the SDN and NFV community, and has been a key figure in the European Telecommunications Standards Institute (ETSI) NFV Industry Specifications Group (ISG), where of course he could well continue to play a key role, depending on his next move.
He will be a hard act to follow at Alcatel-Lucent.
— Ray Le Maistre, 
, Editor-in-Chief, Light Reading
But Skuler is at Alcatel-Lucent until the end of the year, seeing a handover, then taking a break to "recharge the batteries" and will then get into "entrepreneurial mode".
We look forward to hearing exactly what that entails!!