Here are some of the latest executive hirings, promotions, and staff changes. 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 Ali Longwell ([email protected]).

Palo Alto Exec Leaves for Apstra

The former VP of engineering for Palo Alto Networks’ management software and cloud services group Manish Sampat left the security vendor for Apstra. Sampat was named the VP of engineering for the intent-based networking company. At Apstra, Sampat will oversee all of the company’s engineering efforts, which center around simplifying the way that companies design, build, and operate data center networks.

In an introductory blog post at Apstra, Sampat said one of the reasons he joined the team was to help business leaders “move toward a massive simplification of their network operations, enabled by autonomous self-operations.”

CenturyLink Speeds Up CEO Succession

CenturyLink CEO Glen Post pushed up his retirement date by nearly eight months. While CenturyLink initially said that Post would retire January 1, 2019, he will now retire in May following the company’s 2018 shareholder meeting. Post has been the CEO for 26 years and will remain as a board member, but he will step down from his role as executive chairman.

Post will be replaced by Jeff Storey as the CEO and president. Storey joined CenturyLink as its president and COO when the telco provider acquired Level 3, of which Storey was the CEO and president.

Nokia Replaces President

Nokia named Sanjay Goel as the president of global services and as a member of its group leadership team, effective April 1, 2018. The former president of this unit Igor Leprince will support Goel’s transition period, and then Leprince will leave the company.

Goel has been with the company since 2001 when he joined as an account director. Since then, he has held a variety of sales leadership positions, overseeing a variety of global business from India to APAC to Japan.

Nokia’s global leadership team is chaired by the company’s President and CEO Rajeev Suri, and members of the group are named by the board.

Movers and Shakers

Equifax hired Jamil Farshchi as its chief information security officer (CISO), Farshchi was previously the CISO of Home Depot.

The Design and Build Engineer for Rackspace Brevan Reyher replaced Schneider Electric’s Robert Bunger as the project lead for the Open Compute Project (OCP) Foundation’s data center facility project.

Decentralized cloud storage company Storj Labs appointed former CEO and co-founder of Docker Ben Golub as executive chairman and interim CEO.

Coriant formed an executive advisory board and appointed Shanker Baheria, Rick Hubbard, Daniele Ruvinetti, Sam, Saba, and Alex Shalaby to the initial board. Former EVP and CTO of Nokia Hossein Molin also joined Coriant as a strategic executive advisor. Sandra Krief was named managing director for North America at Coriant.

CenturyLink named Matt Gutierrez as its senior managing director for Asia Pacific.

Former Chief Information Officer for the U.S. General Services Administration Steve Grewal joined Cohesity as its CTO.

Cradlepoint appointed Marc Bresniker as its vice president of product management and Pankaj Malhotra as its senior vice president of engineering.

Google hired Injong Rhee to lead its Internet of Things (IoT) business. Rhee resigned as Samsung’s CTO in December 2017.

IoT provider Sigfox appointed Christian Olivier as its president.

IoT and edge intelligence software provider FogHorn expanded its executive team. Mike Hutchinson was named VP of finance, Keith Higgins was named VP of marketing, Greg Makowski was appointed the head of data science services, and Chad Boulanger was named the managing director of EMEA.

Mike Kay, formerly with Ixia, was named Veriflow’s vice president of business development.

According to a post on LinkedIn, former-CTO and co-founder of Skyport Michael Beesley was named CTO of service provider networking at Cisco, following Cisco's acquisition of Skyport.

Application-based SD-WAN provider Cybera added two members to its management team. Jeff Manning, formerly at Cradlepoint, was named executive vice president of worldwide sales, and Jayesh Patel, formerly of Brocade, was hired as senior vice president of business development.

Edge Intelligence hired Chris Whalen as vice president of sales and Neil Cohen as vice president of marketing.

Long-time VMware exec Jeff Jennings left the company to join Google Cloud.