Mark Papermaster has indeed joined Cisco as vice president of the Silicon Switching Group, where he'll be managing the ASIC chips that go into some of Cisco's most important switching lines.
A Cisco spokesman told CRN that Papermaster will be "overseeing a very important part of our business."
Word of Papermaster's hiring at Cisco began to trickle out late Friday. Papermaster had a 25-year career at IBM and was most recently senior vice president of devices hardware engineering at Apple.
Both his hiring at and departure from Apple became media circuses. IBM filed a lawsuit in October 2008, later settled, to attempt to block Papermaster's move to Apple.
Then, in August 2010, Papermaster exited Apple under what was thought to be scrutiny over design flaws in Apple's iPhone 4 -- the dust-up known as "Antennagate." Apple didn't elaborate on the reason for Papermaster's exit, but reports at the time suggested a series of hardware problems and lost confidence from Apple CEO Steve Jobs as reasons.
Papermaster's specific focus at Cisco, according to a spokesman, will be the Nexus 7000 and Catalyst switching lines, both integral to Cisco-led data center deployments and the vendor's overall networking business.
