As Cisco sheds executives, it turns out Juniper has lost one as well. Christofer Hoff, CTO of security, has left the company for a new job outside Silicon Valley.

The departure is entirely voluntary, Hoff tells SDxCentral. He announced the career change himself on Twitter (where he uses the handle Beaker) and on his Rational Survivability blog about a week ago. That led to some amusing speculation about Hoff's career aspirations.

He's not revealing the exact job, but he'll be "leading a fantastic global team focused on security in the financial sector," he writes in an email. He'll be based in Charlotte, N.C. and is not moving to another vendor. BofA seems like a reasonable guess.

Part of his motivation is to get outside the world of product-building. "While there is silly money being tossed about in the security space, to truly make more of a difference, I want to focus on outcomes. I have intimate knowledge of the security supply chain now and will put that to good use in finding vendor partners that can help deliver what we need," Hoff writes.

"It's also been a long four years with an enormous amount of travel, and it has taken a toll on my family — combine that with the craziness that is The Valley, and it's time for a move to an area and job that will help with some of that."

Hoff thinks Juniper is on the right track under CEO Rami Rahim. Hoff also points out that at this point, he himself is not crucial to Juniper's new trajectory, meaning he's not leaving the company in a lurch. (Juniper notes that a search for Hoff's replacement is underway.)

We recently wrote about Hoff's difficult keynote at the RSA Conference, but really, he's had a well respected career. In addition to his four years with Juniper, he's worked at Cisco and Unisys, and he was chief information security officer (CISO) at WesCorp, a corporate credit union.

He's also the guy credited with (or blamed for) starting v0dgeball, the annual charity dodgeball event held in San Francisco the day before VMworld. Hoff hasn't shown up at the last few v0dgeball tourneys, to my knowledge, but his name will forever be related to the concept of people getting pelted in the head with things. That's pretty cool.