Juniper has filled the space left by recently promoted CEO Rami Rahim.
On Thursday, the company announced that Jonathan Davidson has been promoted to executive vice president of development and innovation. Rahim left that role open when he took over the CEO reins from Shaygan Kheradpir, who resigned abruptly in November.
As Juniper employee No. 32, Rahim has been around for nearly all of the company’s 19 years. Davidson, less so. He joined from Cisco in 2010 to take over Juniper’s Edge Routing and Aggregation business, which included the E, M and MX lines of routers.
Just last year, Davidson was named senior vice president of the Networks Security, Switching and Solutions business unit. That group includes the EX line of Ethernet switches, the QFX top-of-rack switches, and the SRX security platform.
Before joining Juniper, Davidson spent 15 years at Cisco, where he was director of product marketing for enterprise routers and Layer 4-7 products.
Kheradpir resigned due to a still-unspecified issue related to a customer negotiation. He had set the wheels in motion with an integrated operating plan to rejuvenate the company, a plan that includes $100 million in cost cutting; analysts will be looking for details about that when Juniper announces earnings on Jan. 27.
Rahim intends to continue executing that plan, but he’s facing what could be a challenging year. AT&T announced last fall that its capital spending for 2015 would be $18 billion, down from $21 billion the previous year, and this appears to be part of a trend. Financial analyst Simon Leopold of Raymond James predicts U.S. carrier capex will be down 4 percent this year compared with 2013, although he adds that some of the impact could be in labor and software — areas that wouldn’t affect equipment vendors.
