A well-known Cisco technologist has joined Brocade as chief scientist and CTO of Brocade's service provider business, the company said this week.

David Meyer, most recently a distinguished engineer at Cisco who focused on OpenFlow and software-defined networking (SDN) trends, is expected to play a key role in Brocade's own SDN strategy and also how it approaches cloud networking, routing and application delivery.

"David is a highly respected industry veteran with decades of experience within the networking space," said Ken Cheng, Brocade vice president and general manager of the Routing, Application Delivery and Software Networking Group, to whom Meyer will report. "His leadership within various industry associations and Internet standards bodies is a testament to his ability to understand at a macro level the implications of the development and standardization of new and emerging technologies that are shaping the future direction of the networking industry."

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Meyer will work with tier-one service providers, cloud hosting providers and Web 2.0 content providers and also be the evangelist for Brocade's approaches for Ethernet fabrics, advanced routing and SDN. He's been in the industry more than 30 years and is active with several major industry associations, including the Internet Engineering Task Force and the Open Networking Foundation.

“With its heritage for driving continued innovation, I believe that Brocade is well positioned to achieve growth within the hotly contested service provider networking market," Meyer said in a statement.

Meyer's hire is the latest example of executive changes within Brocade, which is mounting a CEO search to replace outgoing chief executive Michael Klayko. Another recent departure was Ian Whiting, who exited as EVP of worldwide sales this summer and is now with Riverbed.

Meanwhile, Cisco has recently parted ways with several executives key to its SDN strategy. Along with Meyer's exit, Tom Black, who headed engineering for Cisco's WAN optimization portfolio and also ran Cisco's ONE initiatives specific to SDN, is now vice president, SDN engineering at Arista Networks.

PUBLISHED OCT. 19, 2012