Brocade CEO Klayko Resigns

Michael Klayko, CEO of network firm Brocade has resigned, despite the firm reporting increased profits.

Klayko, CEO since 2005, gave little away in the Brocade resignation announcement, but the company is facing major transitions as it attempts to move to software-defined networks, while still combining its historic storage networking business with the Ethernet technology it acquired with Foundry Networks in 2008.

If it ain’t Brocade…

“We want to thank Mike for his more than seven years of service as CEO,” said Brocade’s Chairman, Dave House. “He has led us through two major acquisitions and has positioned us as a technology leader and world-class provider of networking solutions. We wish him the best and appreciate his continued service to Brocade as the Company works to identify the right leader to assume his role.”

Brocade started out as a maker of Fibre Channel switches used in storage-area networks (SANs), and was launched in 1995 by the co-author of the Fibre Channel standard, Kumar Malavalli, and former Sun exec Seth Neiman.

Since acquiring Foundry, Brocade has taken on Cisco in data centre networking, while also positioning for a move to software-defined networking, and launching networks as a service.

One obvious candidate to replace Klayko would be chief marketing officer John McHugh, who already had successful run as a quasi-CEO at Hewlett-Packard in the early 2000s, whcn HP’s Procurve networking unit operated as an all-but autonomous company. That independence came to an end with HP’s shifts in direction during that decade.

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