Juniper Veteran Named New CEO of Big Switch Networks

Big Switch Networks  announced the appointment of Douglas Murray as Chief Executive Officer. Murray comes to Big Switch from Juniper Networks, where he held various roles including senior vice president and GM of the data center security business and senior vice president of Asia Pacific, Japan and Greater China. Current CEO and co-founder Guido Appenzeller will continue with the company as Chief Technology Officer and board member, working closely with Murray on the next chapter of Big Switch, which focuses on software defined networking (SDN).

"With Doug, we have found the right CEO to take Big Switch to the next level," said Appenzeller. "His breadth of data center expertise led him to resonate with our goals for SDN, and his go-to-market experience is just what the company needs in this next phase of growth. His recent Asia experience has given him a front row seat to the most highly evolved market for SDN, and we could not be more thrilled with our choice. We are confident he is the right person to lead us forward."

Murray has a track record of growing revenue and market share while competing against large incumbents. While leading Asia Pacific at Juniper, enterprise switching grew by over 25 percent in 2012.

Big things ahead for Big Switch

At the Open Networking Users Group Conference last week Big Switch Networks held five demos to preview upcoming releases due out next year, and show a unified P+V SDN software stack spanning a fabric of bare metal (physical) and hypervisor (virtual) switches, driven by OpenStack for application awareness. Unified P+V SDN designs deliver end-to-end automation for massive operational simplification and end-to-end traffic visibility for troubleshooting, and are compatible with today's L4-L7 services. Combining a Unified P+V SDN controller, bare metal switch hardware and OpenStack automation puts network CapEx and OpEx levels comparable to Amazon EC2 within reach for a broad range of enterprises and cloud providers.

"We are seeing tremendous demand for OpenStack-based networks that are competitive to Amazon EC2 in cost, features and automation," said Kyle Forster, Big Switch Network co-founder. "There is simply no way to get there without the economics of bare metal switch hardware, the feature set of OpenStack, and the automation that comes with P+V SDN."