Metaswitch Networks today signaled its ambition to become a major telecommunications vendor, with the appointment of successful industry executive Kevin DeNuccio as chief executive officer.

Timing is great in that Cisco is in the news with a recent earnings release pumpping up the crowd saying that market is ready for a comeback and today with Juniper trumping Cisco on product leadership.

Now Kevin DeNuccio, a fellow Northeastern University alum and former Cisco executive in the early (cowboy) days, is taking over the helm at Metaswitch.  Previously Kevin was at Redback.  At Redback, as CEO, he oversaw the company’s transformation into the fastest growing edge router vendor and subsequent acquisition for $2.1 billion.

At Cisco, as senior vice president, he grew the worldwide service provider division from a $500 million, 500-person organization to $4 billion and 4,000 employees in the space of four years.

I will now be following Metaswitch and a big fan of DeNuccio – disclosure: I have a Northeastern alum bias.  That being said Metaswitch has a good reputation in the networking field.

Industry Strategy and Positioning – Nimble Pure Plays verses the Big Monolithic

All of this brings back the argument on vision of where the market is going.  Some think Cisco is fine – I don’t.  There might be benefits and value to create by being a “pure play” in an open market – end to end tech solutions might just be overrated.

Metaswitch’s opportunity brings up the whole argument of Cisco – they are opening up war on tons of fronts, it’s backfiring and everyone knows it.  There have been tons of pieces in the press about how shareholders aren’t getting a good deal when they buy Cisco stock.  The organization is bloated and doesn’t work well with each other.  There’s brain drain going on, and Cisco’s competitors are properly aligning to take them down.  Certainly fun to watch evolve.

One executive told me privately that “Cisco is like a tick.  They are becoming so swollen that they no longer provide any benefit to themselves – let alone customers.”

UPDATE: My friend Jake on twitter suggests that I’m over the top on calling Cisco bloated.  I agree with him they have been on hiring freezes and cutting back.  That being said the product roadmap seems conflicted and bloated.  I’d love to see some Cisco product leadership examples.