Juniper Networks top management is welcoming Nawaf Bitar as senior vice president and general manager of Emerging Technologies, after working for Cisco as a vice president of engineering and operations for the security technology business unit for the past 4 years and on various executive and management roles at Network Appliance, Silicon Graphics and HP/Apollo.

“Nawaf’s depth of passion, combined with his expertise in engineering and delivering operational excellence, will be invaluable as Juniper continues to lead the charge in architecting the new network built on simplicity, security, openness and scale,” said Mark Bauhaus, executive vice president and general manager, Device and Network Services at Juniper Networks.

Unfortunately for Cisco, this is not the only powerful human resource the company is losing. Recently, former Cisco Senior Vice President and General Manager of the Collaboration Software Group, Debra Chrapaty, has left for Zynga where she will perform as a Chief Information Officer. All these departures come after Cisco’s CEO John Chambers released a company-wide memo last week, in which he acknowledges the loss of focus of the company and proposing a direction for the next couple of months.

Cisco has already started taking practical measure to redress the situation, starting with the dismal shut down of the Flip division, at the cost of dismissing 550 employees and $300 million for lay off charges.  Juniper, on the other hand is developing out its Juniper Networks Partner program. Recently, the company added Thinking Phone Networks by which the latter will be able to deliver cloud-based unified communications services including voice, video and mobility to enterprises seeking to improve collaboration and efficiency throughout their organizations.

Today Juniper also announced the launch of a new product family, Juniper Networks MAG Series Junos Pulse Gateways, that was envisaged for providing a single point of convergence for managing the secure network connectivity and access challenges of a mobile, always-connected workforce.