Jim Lenox, the former VMware executive whose move to Midokura in October 2013 made headlines, has moved again, this time for a Big Data startup.

Lenox's LinkedIn page now lists him as vice president of sales for BlueData Inc. The Mountain View, Calif.-based startup's founders include Kumar Sreekanti, former vice president of R&D at VMware, and Tom Phelan, VMware's former senior architect. Sreekanti and Phelan are BlueData's CEO and chief architect, respectively.

BlueData declined to comment.

In addition to Lenox, sources say Dan Conde, Midokura's director of product and a participant in the OpenDaylight Project's group policy work, has left. Though most of Midokura's 60 staffers work in Tokyo and Barcelona, the departures have sparked rumors of a talent drain at the company's relatively small San Francisco office.

"As companies like Midokura mature beyond the startup phase, some employees are inclined to explore individual interests in other early stage ventures," the company writes in a statement to SDxCentral. "Midokura is adding more people, hiring specifically in engineering, sales, and product marketing areas," the statement adds.

On the surface, Midokura doesn't appear to be starving. Its last announced funding round was for $17.3 million in 2013.

The company has also been busy with partnerships. Last week, Midokura teamed up with Dell, making Enterprise MidoNet — the commercial version of Midokura's software — available on Dell switches and servers. Another example is Fujitsu, which announced in May that its newly launched OpenStack orchestration tool can work with MidoNet; the companies expanded that relationship in October, saying they want to collaborate on virtual networking in general.

The partnerships haven't yielded many announced customers yet. Midokura has disclosed only three wins, most notable among them an IT infrastructure redesign at Softbank Telecom. The others are with Japanese service provider KVH and with Zetta.IO, a newly formed Norweigan provider.

That's led to speculation that the open-sourcing of MidoNet, announced in November, was a ploy to drum up interest in the technology. Midokura denied this, though; the company describes it more as a land grab, an effort to become the de facto networking option for OpenStack.