HP has confirmed to SDxCentral that it's hired Prodip Sen, the executive who'd become a figurehead for network functions virtualization (NFV) at Verizon.

Sen left Verizon sometime in May and will also be stepping down as chairman of the ETSI Industry Specifications Group (ISG) for NFV.

It all seemed rather abrupt (to me it was, anyway), but in any event, Sen is now at HP, a company that's spent the last few months rallying the troops around NFV. The company thinks it's got the goods, and the cloud expertise, to be a leader in NFV implementations, and it's going on the offensive with an NFV group led by Bethany Mayer, the senior vice president who formerly led HP's networking group.

(Speaking of which: We recently sat down with Mayer to get the skinny on that strategy and on her change of roles at HP. Look for that interview on this site very soon.)

We still don't know why Sen left Verizon, but we do have a reason (an official one, anyway) as to why he's stepping down as ISG chair. In a guest article summarizing the ETSI ISG meetings in May, Marc Cohn noted that the group is phasing into a new identity. NFV has gotten beyond the phase of defining requirements. It's now time to work on aiding deployments and ensuring interoperability — and to start considering what to do after the ISG's charter expires at ETSI in January. Some kind of NFV Phase 2 seems likely.

In light of all that, the ISG will be electing new officers at the its next meeting, which starts on July 29 in Santa Clara, Calif. Sen plans to continue working with the ISG but is stepping down for personal reasons, as is vice chair Uwe Michel of Deutsche Telekom, Cohn wrote.