Arista nabs Cisco SDN engineer

Black leaves Cisco ONE to join feisty switch rival; also tabs CFO

Arista Networks has named a former Cisco engineer as its vice president of SDN engineering, and hired a CFO. The maker low latency data center and cloud switches tapped Tom Black, a vice president of engineering at Cisco for 13 years, to help drive its own SDN efforts.

Black most recently had been involved in Cisco's Cisco ONE programmability and SDN efforts. Prior to that, he led engineering for Cisco's WAN optimization products, worked on the ASR 9000 edge router, and built Cisco's data-over-optical product portfolio.

Black also worked at Cerent, an optical company acquired by Cisco for billions back in 1999, and spent a couple of years at HP developing software for the company's Procurve Ethernet switches.

As CFO, Arista appointed Michael Lehman, former CFO of Palo Alto Networks and Sun Microsystems. Lehman prepared Palo Alto for its IPO and then left just before the company filed for its IPO.

Lehman was CFO and executive vice president at Sun when it was acquired by Oracle in 2010.

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