Former VMware executive Shekar Ayyar added a new title and focus, taking over as CEO and chairman of hyperscale networking software company Arrcus. And his first move is to aggregate the vendor’s software systems to target the growing edge networking and cloud space.

Ayyar, who previously served as EVP and GM for VMware’s Telco and Edge Cloud business, said the move to Arrcus started when he was looking into the vendor as part of his work at AdMY Technologies. Ayyar joined that “special purpose acquisition company” earlier this year.

He explained that after looking into Arrcus as an investment opportunity, he found a company with a compelling offer to tackle the convergence between the computing and communications cloud.

This is built on Arrcus’ portfolio of software that provides a networking fabric for the deployment of applications and services across a network using a minimum number of specifically deployed instances.

Ayyar will continue to be “financially involved” with AdMY Technologies, which is focused on investing in telecom, 5G, and edge businesses, but will be “fully involved operationally in Arrcus.”

Building on that involvement, Ayyar’s first move is bundling Arrcus’ ArcOS, ArcIQ, and ArcOrchestrator products into a single platform dubbed the Arrcus Connected Edge (ACE) platform. Ayyar said this provides customers with a single platform to manage the deployment of applications and services in an edge-native way across a data center, enterprise, cloud, or 5G telecom environment.

“It could be somebody who says, look I have my switch architecture and this is my leaf spine architecture I want to replace something on top of rack with something that is more cost effective, more connected to the edge, and is actually intelligent enough to understand what the back-end service provider routing landscape looks like,” Ayyar explained.

He added the vendor is cognizant most of its customers already have platforms in place to serve these needs. Thu it will need to coexist with – and hopefully replace – equipment and software from larger rivals like Cisco, Juniper, and Arista Networks.

“We end up essentially existing alongside, but replacing some of what they do, for sure,” Ayyar explained. “By no means do we have an expansive portfolio that can solve the entirety of what either a Cisco does or Juniper does or Arista does. But we absolutely have something that is better and more technically differentiated in an area or a sliver of what they do.”

Ayyar’s move to Arrcus also coincides with new financial investments from Liberty Global, SamsungNext, and SoftBank. Arrcus did not announce the investment amount, but it adds to the more than $65 million the vendor has attracted since its founding in 2016.