As Cisco (Nasdaq: CSCO) looks to right its ship, the vendor is adding more muscle to its service provider sales force by hiring two key Juniper (NYSE: JNPR) veterans for key sales positions overseeing global and North American sales.
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Cisco hired two key Juniper executives to leadership roles in its global and North American service provider segments. |
The vendor on Friday named Neal Oristano as vice president of global service provider market segment sales. Prior to his post at Cisco, Oristano was the VP of Juniper Americas service provider sales since 2004.
Oristano will report directly to Nick Adamo, Cisco's senior VP of global service provider market segment, and will support the global service provider market strategy.
Also joining the reinvigorated Cisco service team is fellow Juniper veteran Jim Labovites, who will oversee Cisco's North American service provider sales. Labovites will report to Cisco's VP of U.S. service provider sales, Michael Glickman.
In their new roles, Oristano and Labovites will be responsible for pushing Cisco's portfolio of key service provider products, including the CRS-3, ASR routing platforms, Cisco Videoscape TV platform and Cisco data center and managed services offerings.
Juniper, not surprisingly, wasted no time to in responding to Cisco's announcement, arguing that the appointment of two of its former employees will have a minimal impact on their ability to win new deals with large service providers.
"Cisco's actions reflect that Juniper continues to take share from the company," said Juniper spokesperson David Shane in a prepared statement. "We have a deep bench of sales talent and our customer relationships are driven by more than the departure of a few employees."
Shane added that "some of the largest service providers around the world have chosen a technology path based on Juniper's superior solutions, and we do not anticipate them to alter that based on a few sales personnel."
For more:
- see the release
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