After a lengthy stint at Cisco, Ram Bhide has joined Pluribus Networks as vice president of engineering.

Bhide’s experience will help Pluribus deliver on its goal of virtualizing networking in the data center and delivering switches for dynamic computing models, the company said in today’s announcement.

In his new job Bhide is tasked with managing and directing engineering for the company through planning, product design, quality assurance, and all customer-facing aspects of the product life cycle, according to Pluribus.

Bhide spent 21 years at Cisco after starting in 1994. He most recently served as Cisco’s vice president of engineering for the enterprise routing and cable access group.

Prior to that position, Bhide was responsible for delivering many of Cisco’s switching and routing products, including the Catalyst 6800 switch family and ISR/ASR series of LAN and WAN routers.

In order to further its SDN ambitions, Pluribus announced in January that it had landed a Series D funding round of $50 million.