Juniper steals away top Scientific-Atlantic acquisition dude from Cisco

Juniper this week announced that it had hired Luis Avila-Marco as its senior vice president of corporate development, reporting to chairman and CEO Scott Kriens. Prior to this new gig at Juniper, Avila-Marco was with Cisco's Scientific-Atlanta, where he also served as vice president of corporate strategic planning. In both roles his job was to conduct "strategic planning", which is marketing speak for dealmaking. This could mean that Juniper is planning to embark on a shopping spree, says The Deal.com. Avila-Marco spent 14 years at Scientific-Atlantic and prior to that, his experience was mainly all about cable companies in Spain.

The news comes on top of other top executive reshuffling at Juniper. Avila-Marco will take over for Spencer Greene who is being moved to a role with a strange name -- the senior vice president of customer advocacy. (Juniper, why would your customers need an advocate and if so, wouldn't they want someone from outside your company to fight for their rights?)

Last week, Juniper hired a new guy to head up its global sales channel, too. John Morris left the CEO role at a company called Pay By Touch to run Juniper's sales operation. Juniper's former head of sales, Eddie Minshull, will hang around until the end of Juniper's third quarter, Sept.30, acting as an advisor. Minshull is 48 years old, and had only been with Juniper since January, 2006.

Will all of this add up to lots of news of acquisitions from Juniper in the coming months as it works to make progress during a soft spot for Cisco?

More from Cisco Subnet:
Cisco certs and home labs, a great discussion
The 10 most interesting entries from the Cisco iPrize contest
New dual-N band Linksys router geared for multimedia home networking
Cisco, Nivis demo 6LoWPAN IPv6 network
Go to Cisco Subnet for more Cisco news, blogs, discussion forums, security alerts, book giveaways, and more.