Cisco poaches VMware chief for security push

End-user computing expert Chris Young ditches VMware for Cisco

VMware senior vice president Chris Young has jumped ship to Cisco as part of the networking titan's push into the security market.

In his role as senior vice president and general manager at VMware, Young was responsible for overseeing the virtualisation giant's end-user computing strategy. Its aim is to provide people with secure access to applications and data on any device using cloud.

According to a blog by Cisco chief technology officer Parmasree Warrior, Young will join the firm on 14 November.

He will lead the vendor's new security engineering team, which was recently formed through the merger of Cisco's security technologies group with its global government security division.

His appointment follows comments made by Cisco chief executive John Chambers back in February about the important role security will play in the cloud era.

"As our customers and partners well know, security has been front of mind for Cisco this year [and] the pace of innovation and development has been rapid ever since," Warrior's blog stated.

"Even with all this momentum in security, we still saw opportunities to do more [and] for the first time, the security engineering team will [now] be led by an SVP [senior vice president]."

The blog goes on to pay tribute to Cisco's outgoing security technologies vice president, Tom Gillis, who is leaving the company to "pursue his entrepreneurial passion outside Cisco".

Chris Wolf, research vice president at analyst Gartner, used social networking site Twitter to express his surprise at Young's departure.

"[This] leaves a big hole in an important post inside VMware. He was highly respected and I wonder about the ripple effect," he wrote.

At the time of writing, VMware was unable to comment on Young's departure or his replacement.