One VP of engineering departed to Cisco, and now another one comes in from Cisco. Sort of.

Big Switch Networks announced Tuesday that Jeffrey Wang —who most recently hailed from Brocade after spending 19 years at Cisco — has joined as vice president of engineering. He's replacing Howie Xu, who left Big Switch in July and resurfaced at Cisco about a month later.

Wang joins Douglas Murray — the former Juniper executive hired as CEO — to help lead what you might call Big Switch Mark II. (Or "Big Switch Networks, the Bare Metal SDN Company," as the company now apparently refers to itself.)

That new identity still focuses on OpenFlow and software-defined networking (SDN) but eschews the concept of overlays. Big Switch's new centerpiece is a single cloud fabric for physical and virtual switches. It's called the Unified Physical + Virtual (P+V) Cloud Switching Fabric and is in beta testing. It was shown off at the recent Open Networking User Group (ONUG) gathering, but commercial deployment might take a while; Big Switch has professed a liking for long beta cycles.

Wang was most recently a vice president at Brocade overseeing software development for its data-center fabric. That includes the VCS fabric itself and related elements of the VDX switch product line.

His earlier career at Cisco runs deep in switching, with resume entries including the Catalyst 6500, the Nuova spin-in (and its resulting Nexus 5000 switch), the Nexus 1000v virtual switch, Cisco's Virtual Machine Fabric Extender (VM-FEX), and the software side of Cisco's Unified Computing System (UCS).

In the early '90s, before joining Cisco, Wang worked on Nortel's Passport switch family, according to his LinkedIn page.