Lumina Networks has strengthened its engineering roster with the addition of three executives who formerly worked at Ericsson and Cisco.
The three new hires come on the heels of a $10 million round of financing in May that included AT&T and Verizon.
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Avinash Parwaney joined Lumina’s executive team as vice president of engineering after leaving his job as senior director of engineering for Cisco's service provider portfolio. While at Cisco, Parwaney worked with some of Cisco's largest global customers and helped boost its product line expansion into the billions of dollars annual run-rate. Parwaney, who joined Cisco in 2001, also serves as a board adviser at Vizru, a startup focused on autonomous applications and workflow automation for enterprises.
Prem Sankar Gopannan joined Lumina from Ericsson where he was principal architect. In addition to engineering expertise, Gopannan brings his experience in open source communities to Lumina. He currently serves as project team lead for the Kubernetes Integration Project (COE) in OpenDaylight. Lumina has been a big proponent for OpenDaylight-based solutions.
Iyappa Swaminathan comes to Lumina from software-defined network (SDN) supplier Nuviso Networks, where he was vice president for product management and head of India operations. His career stops include prior engineering development experience at both Cisco and Juniper Networks.
The May round of funding, which was Lumina's first, also included Rahi Systems. With the additional funds, Lumina Networks plans further productize its OpenDaylight-based offerings as well as expand into new regions, such as Japan and Europe.
In a previous interview with FierceTelecom, Lumina CEO Andrew Coward said the company has about 60 employees, but he expected that number to increase as it expands into Europe and Japan.
Lumina emerged from the breakup of Brocade with the latter's SDN controller in hand, which Brocade had spent three years developing. SDN controllers are crucial for service providers working toward virtualizing their networks while also keeping legacy elements in play during that transition.
In addition to its SDN controller, the company's product offerings include Lumina Flow Manager and Lumina Zero-Touch Installer. Lumina has made several announcements around software-defined core (SD-core), which includes an alternative to traditional core or MPLS routers in the network. SD-core allows network providers to use white box switches while keeping their existing core router vendors.