Test and measurement vendor Ixia has picked its new president and CEO, and it's likely HP isn't happy about it.

In a surprise move, Ixia announced yesterday that it hired Senior Vice President Bethany Mayer away from HP. She'll be joining Ixia's board as well, and she'll start work as CEO once Ixia catches up on its SEC filings.

Mayer had been picked in February to lead HP's network functions virtualization (NFV) initiative. The company is pushing its combination of applications and servers (software plus hardware, in other words) to try to claim a leadership position in NFV, and Mayer, who had previously run HP Networking, was the star player spearheading the effort. (Here's our interview with her, from June.)

Mayer's departure might explain why NFV, supposedly a big deal for HP, played a bare-minimum role in the company's earnings call yesterday.

The part about all this that's not a surprise is that Ixia needed a new CEO. Vic Alston was fired from that job in October after Ixia determined he'd lied about key elements of his background, including his education and employment history.

The company has been behind on its SEC filings since then. A subsequent internal audit found that some revenues hadn't been reported properly, a problem potentially stretching back to early 2012. The audit also found that this wasn't anything intentional on the part of Alston or then-CFO Tom Miller, who resigned earlier this year.

Earlier this month, Ixia also announced plans to cut 5 to 6 percent of its headcount. Ixia had 1,846 employees at the end of 2013, according to an SEC filing.

Ixia needs to get caught up by Sept. 12, or else it risks being delisted from Nasdaq.