Juniper Engineering VP Joins Stealth Networking Start-Up Nicira
Rob Enns, vice president of engineering at Juniper Networks, has joined Nicira Networks, a networking start-up in stealth mode that’s backed by an investment from Andreessen Horowitz, which invested $9 million in the company earlier this month. It’s also backed by VMware founder Diane Greene.
Enns had spent 11 years at Juniper and oversaw the unit in charge of its Junos network operating system. Before that, he spent 10 years at Berkeley Networks, FORE Systems and IBM.
The news comes only a day after Juniper announced that it had hired Brad Brooks, a vice president of Microsoft’s Windows business unit, as its new vice president of enterprise marketing. Juniper has also been acquisitive in recent months, and bought three companies late last year.
Nicira is working on creating software that it says “virtualizes the network.” The company was founded by researchers from Stanford University and the University of California, Berkeley. Its CTO and co-founder, Martin Casado, did his Ph.D. work on the technology that Nicira hopes to bring to market. Its other two founders are Nick McKeown and Scott Shenker, professors of electrical engineering and computer science at Stanford and Berkeley, respectively. Its CEO is Steve Mullaney a veteran networking executive who’s worked at Palo Alto Networks, Shoretel and Cisco Systems, among others. AH co-founder Ben Horowitz sits on Nicira’s board of directors.
