Back in April, Big Switch Networks dropped out of stealth mode to announce a $13.75 million round of financing, led by Index Ventures and Khosla Ventures. At the time, the company said it was building a new platform that would bring the benefits of virtualization and cloud architecture to enterprise networks by leveraging the OpenFlow standard for its own networking virtualization. In order to make enterprise networking exciting again and become the VMware of networking, the company said it would unite world experts from both the virtualization and networking industry.

Last week Big Switch Networks may have added a key component to see its vision through to fruition, announcing it had lured away VMware R&D expert Howie Xu to head up the company's own engineering and R&D program.

Xu brings with him nine years of experience working for VMware, the last five of which he led VMware's networking R&D team. Xu is credited with co-inventing VMware's Virtual Switch and holds multiple patents in this area. He was also one of the driving forces behind developing the industry's first Distributed Virtual Switch for VMware. Under his leadership at the virtualization giant, the team innovated and collaborated with Cisco to create the widely popular Nexus 1000V appliance.

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Read the entire InfoWorld Virtualization Report article.