Spirent announced on Monday that it has appointed former Amdocs executive Eric Updyke as its new CEO.
Updyke takes over the reins at Spirent from Eric Hutchison, who announced in November that he was retiring after 37 years with the company. Updyke started his employment at Spirent today, and officially will take up the CEO position on May 1 after the company's annual general meeting.
Updyke has held various roles in the industry over the past 35 years. Most recently, he was on Amdocs' executive management team reporting directly to the company's CEO in his role as a group vice president. In this capacity, he had global responsibility for the entire managed services, testing and systems integration businesses, which encompassed 10,000 employees and roughly $2 billion in revenue.
Prior to that role, he was division president for North America at Amdocs where he managed a $1 billion P&L and was responsible for relationships with North American communications service providers.
Before Amdocs, he held executive roles at Nokia Siemens Networks and AT&T. He has an MBA in Finance and a bachelor's degree in Electrical Engineering from Cornell University.
Related: Spirent pushes forward on automation, joins intercarrier demo at MEF18
Spirent, which was founded in London in 1936, is branching out of its role as a traditional testing and service assurance vendor in order to better attune itself with carriers' needs, which includes virtualization and automation.