Verizon alum Stuart Elby tapped to lead Infinera's cloud networks group

Stu Elby, one of Verizon's (NYSE: VZ) key technologists, has taken up new digs at Infinera, where he will serve as the optical vendor's vice president of cloud network strategy and technology.

Stu Elby Infinera

Elby

In his new role, Elby will help drive Infinera's growing presence in the data center market.

A 30-plus year telecom, Elby is best known for his 21-year tenure at Verizon and its predecessor company Nynex. Most recently, he served as vice president and chief technologist of Verizon Labs.

Elby was charged with overseeing the development of Verizon's technology vision and target network architecture to support emerging products and services. In this role, he had significant influence in the network architecture and development of Verizon's platforms for metro and long haul networks, including Verizon's cloud and digital video services.

He also oversaw Verizon's own movement into the cloud for its Digital Media Services and managed the specification and design of multiple core services platforms, including cloud and API secure gateway.

Appointing Elby to lead the cloud services team makes sense. Elby can apply his knowledge about what service providers are looking for in optical solutions to support cloud and data center services.

During its second-quarter earnings call, Infinera executives said that they see their DTN and DTN-X platforms that support 100G being a good fit for the emerging data center interconnection market. The company expects the data center interconnect market will be composed of two segments: long-haul and metro.

"We see the very high capacity metro portion of this data center interconnect market which we were calling metro cloud as distinctly different from a more traditional metro aggregation market driven by telcos and cable operators," said Tom Fallon, CEO of Infinera, during the second-quarter earnings call, according to a Seeking Alpha transcript. "We believe that large scale a 100 gig in the metro will happen first in the metro cloud market starting in earnest in early 2015 and that 100 gig in the metro aggregation market will become interesting in late 2015 or early 2016, a view shared by many industry analysts."

For more:
- see the release
- and the earnings transcript (sub. req.)

Related articles:
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XO deploys Infinera's DTN-X across its 100G network
Infinera Q1 2014 revenue rises to $142M on ongoing 100G sales
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Updated article on Aug. 6 to reflect that Elby had been at Verizon and predecessor company Nynex for 21 years.