Brocade's software-defined networking (SDN) hiring spree continued this week with the addition of Kevin Woods, who led Cisco's ONE Platform Kit (onePK) effort.

Woods started work this week as Brocade's product management director for orchestration and northbound interfaces.

"I get to answer the question: So we got all this great SDN/NFV stuff; how do we make it work?" Woods says.

At Cisco, Woods says he headed up onePK, the API collection that was a crucial part of the Cisco Open Network Environment (ONE) launch in 2012. He says he also helped found the team that crafted Cisco's cross-organizational SDN strategy, getting multiple groups in sync with their plans for the then-new SDN concept.

He won't specify why he left Cisco, but he's sure happy to explain why he's joining Brocade.

"A lot of the established companies, especially the big ones, are initially schizophrenic about SDN, and Brocade doesn't suffer from that," he says. (As we've said before, Brocade thinks of itself as the one who knocks.) "These guys are really committed to SDN. You see it by the hiring that they've been doing and the team that they've been building."

That team includes David Meyer, who heads the technical steering committe for the OpenDaylight Project, and recent additions Thomas Nadeau and Benson Schliesser from Juniper.