Big Switch Networks, the leader in Software-Defined Networking (SDN), today announced the addition of industry veteran Tony Bates to the company’s Board of Directors. Bates was a long time senior executive at Cisco Systems, and is currently the President of the Skype division of Microsoft. He joins industry veterans Mike Volpi, Shirish Sathaye, Mark Leslie, Bill Meehan and co-founders Guido Appenzeller and Kyle Forster on the company’s Board.

As president of the Skype Division of Microsoft, Bates is responsible for overseeing the division’s direction, strategy and overall mission. Before joining as CEO of Skype, he spent more than a decade at Cisco Systems where he served as SVP and GM of several business groups, including Enterprise, Commercial and Small Business, and Cisco’s core high-end router business. Before joining Cisco, Tony spearheaded the backbone-engineering strategy for Internet MCI (MCI’s national IP backbone) and holds ten patents in the area of Layer 2 and 3 innovations. Prior to joining the board of Big Switch, Tony served as a board member of several other successful startups, including YouTube (GOOG) and Lovefilm (AMZN).

“IT leaders are increasingly looking to virtualization and cloud orchestration to address the escalating need for scale and cost efficiencies in data centers. Software Defined Networking is a crucial next step in the realization of the multi-tenant public or private cloud data center, representing a dramatic shift in the one part of the data center that has not kept pace with other innovations, which is the network,” said Tony Bates, Big Switch Networks Director. “By embracing industry standards andopen APIs, Big Switch Networks is leading the way in Open SDN."

“Tony brings a valuable perspective and deep industry knowledge to Big Switch as we go to market with our generally available Open SDN product suite,” said Guido Appenzeller, CEO and co-founder of Big Switch Networks. "We are fortunate to have someone of Tony's caliber contributing to our strategy and our growth.”

About Big Switch Networks

Big Switch Networks is the leader in Open Software-Defined Networking. The company’s Open SDN platform embraces industry standards, open APIs, open source, and vendor-neutral support for both physical and virtual networking infrastructure. Big Switch Networks product suite supports a broad range of networking applications, including network virtualization for public and private cloud data centers built upon OpenStack, CloudStack and other platforms. Big Switch Networks is privately held and has raised over $45M from Goldman Sachs, Intel Capital, Index Ventures, Khosla Ventures, Redpoint Ventures and others. For additional information follow us @bigswitch or visit: bigswitch.com

Big Switch Networks and the Big Switch Networks logo are trademarks of Big Switch Networks in the United States and other countries.* Other names and brands may be claimed as the property of others.