Cisco nabs Juniper sales execs

Jim Duffy

13 years ago

Cisco Systems Inc. has nabbed a couple of Juniper Networks Inc. sales executives for its own service provider sales force.

Neal Oristano is Cisco’s new vice-president of global service provider market segment sales. Oristano spent the past seven years as Juniper’s senior vice-president of Americas service provider sales.

Jim Labovites also joins Cisco as a vice president after “a leadership position” in service provider sales at Juniper.

“We’re thrilled to have added some of the service provider industry’s top sales talent to continue to drive our success in this market,” said Rob Lloyd, Cisco’s executive vice-president of Worldwide Operations.

Juniper is seeing some core router softness as its new T4000 is still in trials. The market was cited as a reason for Juniper’s disappointing second quarter.

Meanwhile, Cisco’s still waiting for CRS-3 core router sales to ramp up. Both Cisco and Juniper had essentially flat first quarter revenue shares in core routing, compared to the fourth quarter of last year. In service provider edge routing, both gained share, with Juniper climbing four percentage points and Cisco two.

Cisco attracted another high-profile Juniper executive in May, tapping David Yen to lead its server access and virtualization technology group. Juniper landed a couple of interesting Cisco people as well.

Oristano will report to Nick Adamo, senior vice-president of the global service provider market segment. Labovites will report to Michael Glickman, vice-president of U.S. service provider sales. In addition to CRS core and ASR 9000 and 5000 edge router sales, the new executives will inherit sales of Cisco’s Videoscape TV platform, which is the subject of much speculation following this week’s departure of its top executive and Cisco’s retreat from the consumer market.

At Juniper, Oristano oversaw all service provider and corporate sales throughout Canada, Latin America and the United States. He also held direct and indirect sales positions at 3Com Corp., Unisphere Networks Inc., Lucent Corp., AT&T Co., Bay Networks Inc. and Digital Equipment Corp.

“Cisco’s actions reflect that Juniper continues to take share from the company,” a Juniper spokesperson said in an e-mailed statement. “We have a deep bench of sales talent and our customer relationships are not affected by the departure of a few employees. 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.”

In a blog post, Cisco says it landed four other Juniper sales execs.