The semi-stealth mode US startup Nicira may be near a major launch, virtualization.info has learned.
The company, founded in 2009, left the stealth mode in February 2010 (read virtualization.info coverage), raising a lot of interest because Diane Greene, the founder and former CEO of VMware, is among its investors.
Apparently, Nicira has been the very first public investment in virtualization technologies that Greene made after she was forced to leave VMware in July 2008.
Albeit the official website suggests that the technology focus is about network virtualization, so far Nicira has remained under the radar, without disclosing any additional information.
Now virtualization.info got reports that the startup is significantly increasing its recruiting activity, hiring talents from Google, Cisco, Yahoo! and other major Silicon Valley firms, including VMware.
For example, in July Nicira hired Geoffrey White, Senior Technical Support Engineer at VMware, and author of the experimental tool esxplot, that VMware offers for free on its Labs online facility.
Similarly, the company hired David Scott, former Member of Technical Staff at Riverbed Technology, in September, and Alexander Yip, former Software Engineer at Google, in October.
But more importantly, two months ago Nicira hired Frank D’Agostino, former Distinguished Systems Engineer at Cisco and appointed him as its new Vice President of Worldwide Technical Operations.
It’s worth to remind that, much earlier this year and even earlier, Nicira also hired other key talents from Cisco and VMware:
- Paul Fazzone, the former Director of Product Management at Cisco, in charge of many networking products, including the Nexus 1000V virtual switch for VMware vSphere. Fazzone took the role of Vice President of Product Management at Nicira starting April.
- Andrew Lambeth, the former Principal Engineer at VMware, a networking rockstar at the virtualization firm, where he remained for over 8 years. Lambeth is Senior Software Engineer at Nicira since February.
- Henrik Amren, the former Senior Director of QA at VMware, where he remained for over 10 years. Amren is at Nicira since November 2008 as MTS.