Martin Casado is taking charge of the VMware NSX platform, as he's being promoted to senior vice president of VMware's networking and security business unit, the company announced Tuesday morning.

It's one of a few executive moves announced by CEO Pat Gelsinger, including changes to the COO and CFO roles.

In running the networking unit, Casado will replace former Nicira CEO Steve Mullaney, who has decided to leave the company as of Sept. 30. It's been about two years since VMware acquired Nicira, so some executive and employee departures wouldn't be wholly unexpected.

The promotion confirms that Casado won't be one of those departing, which is a good thing for VMware. Casado has been the face of Nicira and NSX — and, consequently, a figurehead of software-defined networking (SDN) — for a few years now.

Casado had already been visible as chief technology officer of networking, and sometime in the past year, he'd also been named a VMware fellow, one of four in the company.

Earlier this year, he also stated the case that the hypervisor is in the Goldilocks zone ("just right") to provide network security, because it provides a network-spanning horizontal layer that can still discern network context. Obviously, that's going to be an ongoing theme for him and his business unit. Casado is even hosting a session about it next Tuesday, at 11:00 a.m., at VMworld in San Francisco.

Casado has also been actively involved in the concept of group policy, hoping to create some open definitions for a declarative model of networking. While Cisco is involved in these efforts, there's also a background concern that Cisco might establish a policy model that's not wholly open. Casado started the Congress project in OpenStack as a way to counter that possibility.

VMware announced a few other executive changes today:

• VMware President Carl Eschenbach is adding corporate strategy and business development to his organization.
• CFO Jonathan Chadwick will take on the COO role that Eschenbach had been filling.
• Betsy Sutter was promoted to senior vice president and chief people officer. We didn't make that up.
• Bill Fathers was promoted to executive vice president in charge of VMware's Hybrid Cloud Services business unit. It's not a huge change; Fathers, former president of Savvis, was a senior vice president before. Like Casado, Fathers has been championing a new front for VMware; the vCloud Hybrid Service was launched last year as an alternative to Amazon Web Services.