HP Networking has named Antonio Neri as senior vice president and general manager of the networking business, SDxCentral has learned.

An HP Networking spokesman confirmed today, via an email to SDxCentral, that Neri has already taken over the job. "Effective immediately, Neri will lead both the HP Servers and HP Networking businesses, which will still be run as separate business units in the HP Enterprise Group," the spokesman writes.

A new VP for Networking has been imminent for a few months now, ever since Bethany Mayer was moved away from that job to take charge of HP's network functions virtualization (NFV) efforts.

HP has a lot going on in networking — all the newfangled "open" kinds of networking, specifically. The company was an early believer in OpenFlow, taking the plunge by supporting the protocol on its entire switching product line. HP also reaffirmed its commitment to cloud services this week, saying it's going to spend $1 billion during the next two years on HP Helion, a group of open-source products and services related to the cloud.

As part of that cloud commitment, HP has been heavily involved in OpenStack and now claims to be among the top code contributors to that open-source project.

Neri, who's been with HP since 1995, was previously senior vice president of technology services.