Juniper Grabs Sun's Top Engineer For HPC Push
David Yen, who was most recently the executive vice president of the Microelectronics group at Sun Microsystems, of Santa Clara, Calif., is now the executive vice president of emergency technologies at Sunnyvale, Calif.-based Juniper.
In an SEC filing filed on Tuesday, Sun Yen departed the company on March 21.
A Juniper spokesperson said on Wednesday that Yen is currently assimilating and learning about Juniper initiatives, and is in the process of assembling a talented engineering team.
That team will draw on Yen's high-performance computing experience in developing new products at Juniper. Juniper, which produces networking switches and routers and which is moving ahead on network security and WAN optimization, has recognized that advances in computing and computing power have long outpaced advances in networking technology, and so the company is looking at ways to address the gap, the spokesperson said.
Yen, who holds three patents, has been a major part of Sun's microprocessor development during his nearly 20-year stay at the company.
In May of 2006, his responsibilities expanded to include storage in May of 2006 with the departure of then long-term Sun storage exec Mark Canepa.
However, last October, Sun reorganized to put its storage and server teams together into its new Systems Group under the direction of John Fowler, executive vice president of systems at Sun.
Taking over for Yen as acting executive vice president for microelectronics is Mike Splain, a 20-year Sun veteran. Splain wears many hats at Sun, including fellow, senior vice president, chief engineer, and CTO of the company's Systems group.
Mark Teter, CTO of Advanced Systems Group, a Denver-based solution provider, said he is not concerned about the departure of any particular executives.
"Sun's executive team is a very well-established group," Teter said. "I'm sure Sun will find someone talented to take over for Yen."