Here are some of the latest executive hirings, promotions, and staff changes that happened in August. If you’d like SDxCentral to report on your company’s movers and shakers, or if you’ve got a tip about layoffs and restructuring, please send the information to Sydney Sawaya ([email protected]) for inclusion in the monthly headcount column.

Cisco changed its tune after six months. The company reportedly laid off about 9% of its workforce, six months after CEO Chuck Robbins pledged not to cut jobs in response to the COVID-19 crisis.

The layoffs, first reported by FierceTelecom citing a thread on TheLayoff.com, will impacted more than 7,100 employees.

Robbins, during the company’s most recent earnings call, announced a plan to move most of its portfolio to a cloud-based offering. However, in early April, one month after the World Health Organization declared COVID-19 a global pandemic and weeks after at least one-fourth of the U.S. economy was completely shut down, Robbins pledged to not contribute further to the economic calamity.

The OpenStack Foundation (OSF) is no more, or at least in name. Backed by what it deemed a need to broaden its view of open source-based infrastructure, OSF changed its name to the Open Infrastructure Foundation (OIF), a change that also ties in nicely with the organization’s annual Open Infrastructure Show.

Jonathan Bryce, who remains executive director through the name change, explained that the move builds “on the groundwork that our community has laid over the last 10 years through a variety of open source projects, and really going out and tackling all of this opportunity that lies ahead of us in the next decade of open infrastructure.”

The name change from the OpenStack Foundation to the Open Infrastructure Foundation also pivots the group to focus more on its slate of non-OpenStack projects that don’t yet have the deployment base as OpenStack. These include Airship and StarlingX, both of which have garnered deployments in support of 5G networks from AT&T and Verizon. OIF’s other projects include Kata Containers, OpenInfra Labs, Zuul, and the newly adopted Magma project.

Nokia CEO Pekka Lundmark made his mark on the challenged Finnish company less than three months after taking the helm. He announced a company-wide restructuring and shift in strategy designed to revitalize the vendor’s 5G radio access network (RAN) business and strengthen its position against rival Ericsson.

Lundmark had some clean-up work to do, including decisive actions against complacency, as he described it in his first week on the job.

Nokia is no stranger to tumult and it has a poor track record of adapting to market changes. It commanded about 50% of the mobile phone business in 2007, and almost collapsed in 2013. The challenges Nokia faces today aren’t as profound as those it confronted a decade ago, but its business is shrinking and company stock dove 18.5% following its latest reorganization plans and third quarter of 2020 results.

Lundmark described his vision as a three-part strategy, the first of which was shared today and that will take effect on January 1, 2021. Under his leadership, Nokia said it will abandon “end-to-end as a core strategic idea,” eliminating an overhyped industry phase that Nokia’s previous CEO Rajeev Suri used often to justify the company’s acquisition of Alcatel-Lucent in 2016 and adopted at large.

Vodafone Spain CEO Antonio Coimbra stepped down from his position and was appointed as non-executive chairman of Vodafone Spain. Coimbra is succeeded by Colman Deegan who will serve as Vodafone Spain's new CEO and join the Vodafone Group executive committee.

John Wookey, former EVP of the industry applications and platform technology teams at Salesforce, joined SAP as president of the the Intelligent Spend Management and Business Network markets.

Matt Cillis left his post as VP of sales at CloudBees and joined Instana's executive leadership team as its new CRO.

Data privacy platform provider Privitar expanded its leadership team with the appointment of Steven Totman as CPO.

Data integration and data integrity provider named Jamie Kiser to the expanded role of COO and CCO.

Former managing director and partner at Goldman Sachs Heather Bellini was named Deep Instinct's new CFO.

Crowdsourced cybersecurity platform Bugcrowd announced the appointment of David Castignola as CRO.

Roxanne S. Austin, president and CEO of Austin Investment Advisors, was elected to the Verizon board of directors.

CommScope announced that Eddie Edwards, president and CEO, stepped down after 15 years of service. Edwards is succeeded by Charles “Chuck” Treadway who will serve as the company's new president, CEO, and member of the CommScope board of directors.

Former SVP, marketing cloud at Salesforce PehKeong Teh was named Symend's new CPO.

Data protection and privacy provider Virtru welcomed two new names to its executive team with the additions of former IBM Watson executive Dana Morris as its new SVP of product and former Ericsson executive Will Peppo as its new SVP of of analytics and customer success.

Digital Guardian promoted Tim Bandos from VP of cybersecurity to CISO.

Virsec added a new name to its executive lineup with the appointment of Jim Sortino to VP of U.S. Sales.

Bain Capital Ventures operating partner Jeff Williams became the latest addition to the Armis executive leadership team as the company's new CRO.

Interface Security Systems promoted Brent Duncan to president and COO.

Freshworks appointed former Atlassian executive José Morales as CRO.

Task-specific data center service provider SoftIron announced Greg Bruno as its new chief architect.

BigPanda welcomed former VP of employee experience and development at Pandora Matt Morgan as CPO.

VMware expanded its leadership team with the three new IT and digital transformation appointments:

• Mike Hayes – chief digital transformation officer
• Jason Conyard – promoted from VP IT, colleague experience and technology to CIO
• Bask Iyer – customer experience advisory council

Intelligent edge provider Wind River announced three new executive appointments:

• Cyra Richardson – CPO
• Michael Gale – CMO
• Paul Miller – CTO

Cloud access risk security company Ermetic unveiled its board of advisors:

• Elie AbenMoha – chief IT security officer for Publicis Groupe
• Gerhard Eschelbeck – retired VP security and privacy engineering for Google
• Adrian Ludwig - CISO for Atlassian
• Travis McPeak - security engineering manager for Netflix