Big Switch Networks Announces Expansion Into EMEA Region With New Head of Sales; Appoints Global VP of Business Development

LONDON, UNITED KINGDOM--(Marketwired - Nov 24, 2016) - Big Switch Networks®, the leader in bringing hyperscale-inspired networking to datacentres worldwide, today announced its expansion into the Europe, Middle East and Africa (EMEA) region and that it has appointed Julian Demurjian as Head of Sales. Susheel Chitre has also joined the SDN leader as global VP of Business Development. The company's EMEA HQ will be based in London, United Kingdom.

"We are thrilled to add Susheel and Julian to our growing team, with each bringing to Big Switch years of domain expertise to assist in the next chapter of the company's growth," said Douglas Murray, CEO, Big Switch Networks. "We are pleased to have a dedicated sales and support team in the EMEA region to further serve our rapidly growing customer base."

Chitre comes to Big Switch with more than 20 years of business development and sales experience in the networking and datacentre industry. His focus at Big Switch will be to manage existing strategic relationships with Dell Technologies and Accton, and to build out the company's ecosystem of OEM, Channel and Technology partnerships. Most recently, Susheel was the VP of Business Development at Embrane, which was acquired by Cisco in 2015. Prior to that, Susheel was Director of Worldwide Channels at Cisco, where he was responsible for Cisco's global OEM business development and their Cloud Go-to-Market partner strategy and programs. Prior to Cisco, Susheel was at Andiamo Systems driving their partnership and business development efforts with all major storage vendors and technology and ISV partners. He has held various roles from systems engineering, sales and strategic alliances in the data center space with Cray Research, Silicon Graphics and Brocade.

"As a longtime veteran of the datacentre networking space I'm thrilled to be joining a company with not only innovative vision, but mature products ready for production deployment," said Susheel Chitre, VP of Business Development, Big Switch Networks. "As someone who has been in this space for a long time, I see the demand from customers for open technologies that offers more choice, flexibility and operational simplicity."

Demurjian will lead the company's expansion efforts in the EMEA region. His extensive expertise spans market entry, emerging markets, channel and partner program development. Previously, Demurjian was VP of EMEA Sales at Datiphy and prior to that he spent six years at Gigamon, where he was the Regional Sales Director for The Nordics, Russia and the Commonwealth of Independent States. While at Gigamon, Demurjian managed a team of sales and sales-engineering resources who collectively owned a significant territory. Under Demurjian's leadership, Gigamon's revenue grew at more than 50% YoY in the aforementioned regions, where he and his teams consistently exceeded sales goals and also penetrated many key accounts within the telco and enterprise verticals.

"I am excited to join the company and expand our rapidly growing EMEA business practice. Big Switch Networks is at the forefront of next-generation networking and a leading vendor with a proven, differentiated, ready to deploy SDN solution," said Julian Demurjian, Head of Sales, EMEA, Big Switch Networks, "BSN's Monitoring Fabric is the only SDN-based network packet broker solution in the market and is leading the transformation of the traffic visibility space."

Big Monitoring Fabric
Big Monitoring Fabric (BMF) is a next-generation network packet broker (NPB) that leverages SDN principles, Open Networking switches and an x86-based DPDK service node to provide feature-rich, scale-out datacentre monitoring. BMF supports 1G, 10G, 40G and 100G for the most demanding and high volume network monitoring environments.

Popular customer use cases for Big Monitoring Fabric include: multi-tenant security monitoring, 10G / 40G/ 100G datacentre visibility, mobile/LTE monitoring and remote DC monitoring and DMZ/Extranet Inline security tool chaining. Inline monitoring, which is driven by cybersecurity needs, is one of the fastest growing use cases for Big Monitoring Fabric. The inline mode radically simplifies software-based policy tool chaining for dramatically hardened inline network security, and scalable load balancing. Benefits include:

• Scale-out security tool chaining
• Operational simplicity throughout its life-cycle of deploy, provision and maintain
• Deployment flexibility leading to infrastructure efficiency and CAPEX reduction

Big Cloud Fabric
Big Cloud Fabric (BCF) delivers next-generation datacentre networking -- the promise of hyper-scale agility, economics and operational simplicity delivered to OpenStack Platform clouds or VMware virtualization environments. BCF is the industry's first leaf/spine SDN fabric to support open networking switches. In OpenStack environments, the BCF controller acts as a single pane of glass for network provisioning, troubleshooting, visibility and analytics of the entire physical and virtual network environment, delivering tremendous improvements in network agility, automation and operational efficiency. In VMware environments, BCF connects with vCenter APIs to provide physical network automation and visibility for vSphere, and can serve as a network fabric underlay for VMware NSX™ network virtualization deployments.

Customer Adoption
Big Switch continues to grow its global footprint, currently working with customers across the US, APAC and EMEA regions, in verticals including: tech, financial services, government, telecom, media, and higher education. Customers include Verizon, the U.S. Federal Government, Intuit, Clemson University, U2 Cloud, 10 of the 15 largest telcos in the world, multiple global financial services firms, media companies, and a Fortune 5 oil & gas company.

CleanSafeCloud, one of the world's most secure and environmentally friendly cloud service providers, based in Switzerland, has been a long-time Big Switch customer. CleanSafeCloud deployed Big Cloud Fabric because it was an ideal solution to integrate with OpenStack, it is easy to manage, highly resilient and scalable. The cloud service provider's objectives for deploying Big Cloud Fabric were threefold: to set up a highly reliable, cloud based Object Storage infrastructure, to reduce networking TCO by leveraging open networking switch hardware and open SDN software to avoid vendor lock-in, and to enable easy scale-up and adoption of new technologies addressing the needs of current and future cloud service offerings.

"CleanSafeCloud Ltd has been operating Big Cloud Fabric as the backbone of its cloud infrastructure with 100% uptime in production throughout the past year," said Christian Sarrasin, CEO & Founder, CleanSafeCloud. "We couldn't be happier with the stability and quality of the product, the next-generation technology and last but not least the CapEx and OpEx savings it affords, which are critical advantages for a growing company such as ours."

Digita Oy is the leading broadcasting network operator and media service provider in Finland. Digita delivers TV and radio programs to terrestrial networks, other service providers and internet delivery. Digita uses Big Switch's Big Monitoring Fabric for video quality monitoring in its critical, real-time broadcasting environment. When Digita was reviewing monitoring solutions it first looked at traditional NPBs, but ultimately selected BMF because the solution was scalable, pay as you grow, integrated with known open hardware options, and was easy to operate, even for non-network staff. Because of the environment, which Digita is using BMF to monitor, it was incredibly important that the solution it selected would enable the broadcast network operator to tap any delivery point in the network and monitor the traffic transparently. With BMF, Digita has a centralized monitoring point to the distributed network, which helps its real-time video service operations and speeds up troubleshooting on the network side.

"We wanted to build a dedicated Ethernet monitoring network for critical video delivery services and to easily tap various measurement points around the network. First we looked at traditional Network Packet Brokers (NPBs) but soon realized that we needed a more flexible and scalable solution. BMF offers simplicity and scalability, and allows us to start small and grow as needed and it is easy to use and deploy, and offers all the features we need," said Leimio Antti, System Designer, IP Networks, Digita Oy. "We can easily tap any fiber connection in the network and quickly see if we have problems in video quality. BMF can aggregate monitoring traffic and forward it to centralized measurement devices. This simplifies and speeds up our operations and troubleshooting. We can also add inline security monitoring on the same system and troubleshoot network issues effectively with BMF."

Company Momentum
In early 2016 Big Switch announced its Series C funding for $48.5MM, which included participation from both new and existing investors and brings the company's total funding to $94MM. In the latest quarter, the company experienced more than double YoY growth and recently announced several key hires including Wendell Laidley, CFO, Mike Hoffman, CRO & Head of Worldwide Sales and Greg Orr, VP of Sales, Americas. Big Switch's BSN Labs, which enables instant access to its products via an online, hands-on testbed demo environment in the cloud, now has more than 4,000 active users since its release in 2015. To test BSN Labs: http://labs.bigswitch.com/users/login

Global Technology Partners and Support for Open Networking Hardware
Through its longstanding partnership with Dell EMC, Big Switch has already developed a strong customer base, which spans across the entire EMEA geographical region. Additionally, the company has technology partnerships with A10, BlueCoat, Dell EMC, Edgecore Networks, ExtraHop, F5, FireEye, Palo Alto Networks, Red Hat, Riverbed, VMware and more to offer EMEA customers a broad range of deployment options to drive business agility, flexibility and reduced cost of ownership of network operations.

Open networking switches offer an innovative disaggregated-hardware/software solution for datacentre networking. These joint solutions give customers the power to transform their networks and accelerate datacentre innovation with simplified, high-capacity network fabrics. Designed to ease network fabric orchestration and automation, open networking switch solutions are cost-effective, easy to deploy and provide a clear path to SDN via Big Switch Networks. Both Big Monitoring Fabric and Big Cloud Fabric support the latest Broadcom Trident-II+ and Tomahawk based Open Networking switches from Dell EMC and Edgecore Networks.

Supporting Materials
Datasheet: Big Cloud Fabric
Datasheet: Big Monitoring Fabric
Gartner Research Report: How to Make a Path to SDN Success
Gartner Research Report: Scrutinize Next-Generation Technology Before Buying Another Network Management Tool
Hands on environment: BSN Labs
Customer use case: CleanSafeCloud

About Big Switch Networks
Big Switch Networks is the market leader in bringing hyperscale-inspired datacentre networking technologies to a mainstream datacentre audience. The company is taking three key hyperscale technologies -- OEM/ODM bare metal and open Ethernet switch hardware, sophisticated SDN control software, and core-and-pod datacentre designs -- and leveraging them in fit-for-purpose products designed for use in enterprises, cloud providers, and service providers. The company's Big Monitoring Fabric is a feature-rich next-generation Network Packet Broker to monitor and protect existing networks, Inline Mode is the industry's first security DMZ service chaining solution, and Big Cloud Fabric is the industry's most advanced open networking switching fabric intended for new datacentre pods such as OpenStack private cloud, VMware VSAN, NSX, big data, and VDI. For additional information: email info@bigswitch.com, follow @bigswitch, or visit www.bigswitch.com.

Big Switch Networks, Big Cloud Fabric, Big Monitoring Fabric, the Big Switch Networks logo, Switch Light OS, and Switch Light are trademarks or registered trademarks of Big Switch Networks, Inc. All other trademarks, service marks, registered marks, or registered service marks are the property of their respective owners.