VMware Australia hires HP Networking boss

Raymond Maisano, HP Australia's former networking boss, has re-emerged at VMware, where he will head up ANZ sales across the vendor's networking, storage and data centre offerings.

Maisano departed HP after 15 years with the vendor, most recently as general manager of HP Networking.

Previous roles at HP included GM of industry-standard servers and business development manager of HP BladeSystem.

His networking and server credentials will come in handy at VMware, where he is now director specialist sales, responsible for VMware's software-defined data centre, NSX software-defined networking platform, and VSAN software-defined storage across Australia and New Zealand.

SDN has long been a hyped technology for the future, but Maisano said many VMware customers had gone live.

"For us, it is an incredibly large opportunity. I have been surprised at the amount of customers who are running it in full production already. The exciting part is coming on board and seeing this is already operational.

"In my previous roles I saw SDN as a potential in the market but ultimately customers outside a few didn't deploy its capabilities, but now I am seeing it in action and the interest and the excitement from the market is large," Maisano told CRN.

VMware's main opponent in SDN has been networking market leader Cisco, with the two vendors taking divergent approaches to SDN – VMware a software-only approach, Cisco arguing that hardware remains key to networks.

VMware's vice president of worldwide systems engineering, Dominick Delfino, recently told CRN USA that a significant majority of its SDN customers are running on Cisco networking gear.

"Quite frankly, probably about three quarters of our customers are running [NSX] on top of a Cisco network today – they're the market leader," said Delfino.

VMware has also announced the appointment of Andrew Fox as its new sales director, business mobility and end user computing, with a portfolio that includes AirWatch.

Fox spent 10 years with SAP, most recently as its director of managed mobility outsourcing SAP Asia Pacific, and also held a number of senior channel roles.