Software-defined networking startup Plexxi Inc., is on a mission to transform the networking landscape, and to do so it’s just hired the services of one of the best executives in the business.

Richard Napolitano, a former president of EMC Corp.’s unified storage division, joins Plexxi as its new Chief Executive Officer with a mission to transform the networking industry into an “application and data-focused era powered by the explosive growth in mobile, social media, cloud and big data.”

Napolitano’s reputation precedes him. He has a long and successful track record of disrupting industries by scaling out businesses to record growth – as well as his role at EMC, he previously served as the president and general manager of US sales for Sun Microsystems Inc., before it was acquired by Oracle Corp. Before that, he served as the CEO and president of Pirus Networks Inc., and was the co-founder and CEO of Data Kinesis, which was later acquired by Adaptec Inc.

Plexxi is a relatively new kid on the networking scene, but it’s determined to make some serious waves. The company’s Founder and former CEO David Husak appeared on theCUBE at BigDataNYC 2014, where he explained his mission to capitalize on the scale out trends that we’ve witnessed in other IT sectors. Both compute and storage have scaled out, and now it’s time for networking to scale out too.

“With Plexxi the inspiration was actually recognizing the way we’ve been building switch networks hierarchically for the last twenty years now, it doesn’t scale the way that applications and data is scaling out. The requirements have changed,” said Husak.

“We think we have a take on networking for scale out applications and Big Data that offers really compelling advantages compared to the alternative, which is not only Cisco, but also everybody else.”

***Plexxi Founder CEO David Husak talks about his vision of scale-out networking***

It’s a vision that’s clearly shared by Napolitano himself, who also dropped by theCUBE at the BigDataNYC 2014 event:

“We’re in a unique moment,” said Napolitano. “If you think about the four fundamental building blocks of IT – applications, compute, networking and storage, we’ve always had a very certain architecture.”

Napolitano explained how, in the old days, IT architecture was always extremely monolithic, with everything tightly bundled and sold by a single vendor. But modern IT has since transformed into a kind of “best of breed model”, in which the applications have becme independent of compute, where compute has become independent of the network, and where the network has become independent of storage. The problem with that, says Napolitano, is “there’s a lot of system integration that occurs to create a value proposition for customers.”

“Now we’re facing a time where all of these architectural building blocks are now blurring. What is compute? What is the application, What is storage? All of these boundaries to the fundamental building blocks are shifting around, and it’s fascinating.”

***Richard Napolitano talks IT trends with Wikibon’s Dave Vellante on theCUBE***

“We stand today at a transition point in the IT landscape,” added Napolitano in a prepared statement. “This transformation will upend the networking industry as we know it and affect how businesses operate for decades to come. Plexxi has helped define “What’s next” in networking so I’m excited to join the company as Plexxi leads the way into this new IT era and defines the next generation of networking architecture.”

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