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VMware Vet Howie Xu Joins Big Switch Networks As VP Of Engineering

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Big Switch Networks, an OpenFlow company bringing the benefits of virtualization and cloud architecture to enterprise networks, today announced that Howie Xu has joined the company to lead the R&D organization.

Xu was at VMware for nine years before joining Big Switch Networks.

He led VMware’s networking R&D team for the past five years and, under his leadership, the team innovated and developed the industry’s first Distributed Virtual Switch and collaborated with Cisco on Nexus 1000V.

He joined VMware in 2002 as one of the lead developers in virtual networking. He is credited with co-inventing VMware’s Virtual Switch and holds multiple patents in this area.

Big Switch Network’s technical staff has doubled in size this year. More than 70 percent of the team has at least one graduate degree in CS; 50 percent of the team are former distinguished engineers, principal engineers, senior staff engineers or faculty from leading universities.

The company is continuing to hire and recently moved into its new corporate headquarters in Palo Alto.

Adaptivity Raises $6 Million; Lee Congdon Joins Board; Robert Macfarlane Joins As New CTO

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Adaptivity, which provides an intelligent IT blueprinting software suite, announced today that it has raised an additional $6 million of venture capital financing from Intel Capital, Intersouth Partners and Noro-Moseley Partners, to be funded in two $3 million tranches the first of which was funded on July 29, 2011.

The company also announced that Lee Congdon, CIO of Red Hat, has joined its Board of Directors and that Robert MacFarlane, former VP and Director, Technology Asset Management of Wells Fargo, has joined the company as its new CTO.

The additional equity funding will be used to accelerate product development and scale sales and marketing infrastructure to support growing market demand for the company’s Blueprint4IT Lifecycle Suite of software products.

The investors previously invested $10 million in October 2010.

Ziften Names Former Disney CIO Roger Berry To Its Advisory Board

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Ziften Technologies, an enterprise system efficiency company, today announced the appointment of Roger Berry to its advisory board.

Berry has served as a member of the Hewlett Packard Technology Advisory Council and the University of Florida Technology Board, and presently serves on University of Houston-Tier One Advisory Board.

Berry previously served as CIO of Walt Disney Parks & Resorts for over a decade. Prior to Walt Disney, Berry served as VP and CIO of Campbell Soup Company, as well as Tenneco.

He majored in Mathematics, and minored in Computer Science, earning a B.A. from the University of Houston.

Ziften offers enterprise software that empowers organizations to better understand and control applications running across their Windows desktop environments and to automatically eliminate, restrict, or accelerate them based on relative business value.

With extensive experience deploying behavioral software to more than 150 million systems worldwide, Ziften has understanding of Windows process behavior and application performance.

The comany is backed by Fayez Sarofim & Co. and Trellis Partners, and boasts advisory board members including the founder of Tivoli, the founder of iChat and the former President & COO of Waste Management,.

Qvidian Names Jim Eliason As CFO

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Qvidian, which specializes in cloud computing sales effectiveness applications, today announced that Jim Eliason has joined the company as Chief Financial Officer. He will oversee all aspects of finance, legal, and human resources.

Eliason was most recently CFO for Desktone, a privately held, venture-backed company that provides a virtual desktop hosting platform that enables desktops as a service for enterprises.

Earlier in his career, Eliason was CFO for Empirix, a provider of testing and monitoring tools for voice and data applications.

He also held the position of CFO for Narad Networks, a telecommunications provider of broadband solutions to cable operators, where he helped raise more than $30 million of venture capital over two rounds of financing as part of a re-start team.

Eliason holds an M.B.A. in Finance from Bentley College and a B.S. in Accounting from Providence College. He is a licensed CPA in the state of Massachusetts.

Robert Yusin Joins AccelOps As VP, Worldwide Sales

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AccelOps, provider of end-to-end monitoring solutions designed for cloud-generation data centers, today announced that Robert Yusin has joined the company as vice president of worldwide sales.

He will lead the company’s global sales growth in the cloud-monitoring marketplace.

A Silicon Valley veteran, Robert Yusin was most recently VP of Sales at Fox Technologies. Previously, he served as EVP of Worldwide Operations at Loglogic, and also managed sales teams in multiple regions at Symantec Corporation.

Yusin holds BA and MBA degrees from Saint Mary’s College, Moraga, California.