Former Juniper CEO, Verizon veteran Kheradpir takes reins at Coriant

Coriant has tapped former Juniper CEO and Verizon veteran Shaygan Kheradpir as its new CEO and board chairman, succeeding Pat DiPietro, who will become the company's  chairman.

Coriant Shaygan Kheradpir

Kheradpir (Source: Coriant)

Kheradpir takes the CEO role after having worked with Coriant's senior management team earlier this year as operating partner at Coriant's owner Marlin Equity Partners.

A 28-year telecom industry veteran, Kheradpir most recently served as the CEO of Juniper. He resigned from the top post at Juniper Networks in November 2014 following a review of his conduct by the company's board of directors related to a negotiation with one of their customers. His tenure at Juniper was short, as he arrived at Juniper in January from Barclays PLC. 

Prior to Barclays, Kheradpir is known as a key executive at Verizon and GTE. As Verizon's EVP and CIO he was a key figure in helping the telco roll out its FiOS FTTH service, a program that included a capital investment of over $20 billion.

As an optical vendor created out of the combination of Nokia Siemens Networks (NSN) Optical Networks, Tellabs, and Sycamore Networks, Kheradpir's challenge will be in helping grow the company against a group of competitors like Alcatel-Lucent, Ciena, Cisco and Infinera.

An IHS Infonetics report said that Coriant's optical revenues in 2014 declined 11 percent, while Ciena, Infinera and ZTE saw large gains of 12, 23 and 26 percent, respectively.

However, a separate IHS Infonetics report said that Coriant "positioned itself as a vendor focused on large customers and carriers and expects to build on a successful track record of supplying packet-optical systems."

The company has been winning deals with a number of key customers, particularly with a number of international carriers, including Australia's NBN, BSNL, China Unicom, and Telia Sonera International Carrier (TSIC). 

Kheradpir's key task as CEO will be to drive new sales of its equipment to meet service providers' 100G to multi-terabit coherent metro and long haul transport deployments, hyperscale data center and cloud infrastructure buildouts, and mobile backhaul upgrades to accommodate 4G and upcoming 5G deployments.

For more:
- see the release

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