Eric Yu VP for Greater China, Brocade

Brocade Communications Systems, Inc. announced the appointments of Eric Yu as VP for Greater China and Brian Levy as senior director and head of technology, EMEA.

These two newly created positions are the latest in a series of new hires for Brocade as it further strengthens its leadership team, enabling the company to serve key customer segments such as tier 1 service providers and technology areas such as the Software-Defined Networking (SDN) and Network Functions Virtualization (NFV) markets.

Both Yu and Levy join Brocade from Juniper Networks and bring with them decades of specialized industry experience from the data center networking industry.

  Brian Levy
Working alongside Curt Beckmann, Brocade CTO in EMEA, he is responsible for bringing Brocade’s vision for cloud strategy and virtualized infrastructure to the market. He will also be charged with providing insight and communicating product vision and direction internally and externally, to both customers and analysts.

Before joining Brocade, he served as Juniper Networks CTO service provider sector EMEA, a role in which he supported the service provider sales organization and worked in collaboration with the development teams in order to bring new products to market. As the global lead within Juniper for SDN and NFV initiatives, he worked with customers, partners and development teams to introduce and advocate SDN in the industry. He has held many senior positions in the industry working for both suppliers and service providers. At HP he was the global CTO for their media and communications business and he was the group technology officer at British Telecom.

“With 92% of senior IT decision makers admitting that their current infrastructure is not scalable enough to support next-generation applications, it is clear that we are, by necessity, on the verge of a major change in how we design, deploy, and manage network infrastructure,” commented Levy. “Brocade is a pioneering force in software-defined networking, with an impressive commitment to high-quality performance, innovation, and open networking standards. It is a great time to be joining the company. I am very much looking forward to working with the rest of the EMEA team and our customers to help turn the huge potential of new technologies such as SDN and NFV into a reality.”

 Eric Yu
He has been tasked with accelerating Brocade’s business growth in software networking with partners across the Greater China region spanning China, Hong Kong, Macao, and Taiwan. Yu will be based in Beijing, China, and report to Brocade VP for AsiaPac Adam Judd.

He was most recently VP for Greater China at Juniper Networks, where he built out the company’s regional business with some of the largest service provider and enterprise customers. Prior to that, he was regional sales manager for service providers at Cisco Taiwan.

“Many operators and service providers across Greater China are planning to deploy SDN and the OpenFlow protocol in their networks in various phases over the next two to three years. Brocade is uniquely positioned to help provide a clear upgrade path to SDN by enabling service providers to leverage existing network investments and start deploying SDN in parts of the network with minimal risk,” said Yu. “It is an exciting time to be in data center networking, and I am excited to join Brocade, a strong proponent of open networking technology, which I truly believe is the future at this important juncture.”

According to a study conducted by Plexxi, SDNCentral, and Lightspeed Venture Partners, the SDN market is expected to surpass $35 billion in the next five years. The percentage of spending on SDN-enabled network equipment is expected to increase from 2% this year to 40% in 2018.