Craig Barratt, who has led Google’s efforts to build fiber networks, joined Barefoot Networks as president and CEO.

Barratt most recently served as senior vice president at Google and CEO of Alphabet's Access business, which includes the Google Fiber broadband Internet service.

Prior to Google, Barratt served as CEO of Atheros, which was acquired by Qualcomm in 2011 for $3.6 billion. He then led the Atheros group within Qualcomm.

Barratt joins Barefoot as the company is preparing to hit the market with its Ethernet switch chip, Tofino. Networking systems built on Tofino are currently under development with Barefoot partners Edgecore and Wistron NeWeb.

Barefoot's vision is to enable programmability in high-performance switching. Its Tofino chip uses the open source P4 language.

Barefoot co-founder and current CEO Martin Izzard is becoming VP of technology.

In October 2016, Google announced a “pause” to its Google Fiber initiative, deciding to not roll out the technology to any more cities for the time being.