New Calix Product Leader Brings Data Center Expertise to Drive Access Network Transformation

With AXOS innovations rapidly coming to market across all our E-series systems, the E9-2 Intelligent Edge System continues to lead the way for service providers who are looking to leverage the best of data center technologies in their access networks. As we continue to help our customers along this path, Peter Rando has joined my team as senior director of product management, focused on the data center.  Let’s learn more about Peter in my recent chat with him.

Shane: Welcome to Calix Peter! Tell me a little about yourself and your background before joining us.

Peter: I have about 20 years in the industry before coming to Calix, with experience working at service providers, SP infrastructure providers, and enterprise technology vendors. Many years ago, I started on the service provider side with Frontier Communications, Verizon Wireless, and Global Crossing. After that, I transitioned to the supplier side of the industry, where I worked in product management, product marketing, and business development focused on routing, switching, and SP solutions development at Cisco. Next, I spent a few years at Juniper where I led product management developing a new data center fabric architecture from the ground up, which became the Juniper QFX switch product line. I then started going deeper into data center, and systems design when I went to a joint venture between Cisco and EMC called VCE where I built the product management and engineering teams, which created a completely new market segment in the data center space which is known as converged infrastructure. While I was there, we grew from $35 million to $1 billion in three years. For the past four years, I was in several different roles at Hewlett Packard Enterprise (HPE), which included serving as acting CTO for their Converged Systems business unit leading product strategy there followed by running product management for HPE’s hybrid cloud platform called OneSphere and then running Technical Marketing and Partner Solutions development leading joint solutions development with companies such as Microsoft, VMware, and Docker.

Shane: Why did you decide to join Calix?

Peter:  I have worked at both large and small companies over the course of my career. The size of Calix today is a lot of fun. Calix is big enough to get things done and have structure, but still small enough to be focused and able to make fast decisions. In Calix, I saw a company that had quite a few years behind it but was ready to try to make a real change in what they were, and at a size where I knew I could make an impact and have an influence all the way up to the top.

But what else brought me to this role? Well, the central office is beginning to look more like a data center. It is taking on more of the principles and concepts of data center focused companies when it comes to how we build products and build architectures. The E9, for example, has more similarities data center products than to traditional large platforms traditionally deployed in traditional service provider central offices. I happen to have significant experience in doing both. So, this seemed to be a very interesting time for access as well as a very interesting challenge for me.

Shane:  What opportunity to do you see for your area of focus for both Calix and our service provider customers.

Peter: My key responsibility at Calix is to make sure the E9-2 is a wild success; and a product which really changes the way people think of access within the service provider network. There is a great foundation in place, and we need to scale it.

The E9-2 is a fundamental re-thinking of how large systems should be built. It adopted a lot of the components from large data centers, in terms of software defined architectures and how we model and deploy applications. That will be huge for service providers as they move forward when compared with how they used to do things.

The E9-2 also is a recognition that our real value as a vendor is building the software that exploits the components, not building the components themselves. So, with a platform that has recognized modern development concepts and its built on state-of-the-art silicon, there is a lot of potential. When you can take that and combine it with a company like Calix, at our size, still nimble, the opportunity compared to the incumbent vendors in access is huge.

Shane: Tell us something about yourself that we don’t know.

Peter: Well outside of my technology career, I have had some interesting jobs.  Right out of college, I worked at a nuclear power plant. And in addition to that, I also owned a bar and a chain of retail stores along with my brother in the Syracuse, New York area, close to where we went to college. It was a lot of fun, carrying on a tradition of the bar and restaurant business in my family, but also required a lot of time.

As you are transforming your central office of yesterday into the data center of tomorrow, I hope you all get to work with Peter and leverage his wealth of knowledge to accelerate and simplify your projects.