Management Team

Guido Appenzeller

CEO / Co-Founder – Board Member

Guido is the Co-Founder and CEO of Big Switch Networks. Before co-founding Big Switch Networks, he was a Consulting Assistant Professor at Stanford University and head of the Clean Slate Lab where he led the research team that developed the OpenFlow v1.0 standard and the reference switch and controller implementations. Guido previously was CTO of Voltage Security, an enterprise software company that he co-founded and grew from zero to profitability and over 1000 Enterprise customers. He was named a Technology Pioneer by the World Economic Forum and holds a PhD in Computer Science from Stanford University and a MS in Physics from the Karlsruhe Institute of Technology.

Kyle Forster

Kyle Forster
President / Co-Founder – Board Member

Kyle spent most of his career at Cisco, initially as the technical assistant to SVP Mike Volpi and later as a Product Manager in the cellular and wifi business units. He launched three v1.0 products in wireless and security and finished his time there managing a ~$100 million portfolio of Cisco’s WLAN Controllers. In between Cisco and Big Switch Networks, he was VP of Product Management at Joost, a peer-to-peer TV-over-the-Internet company from the founders of Skype. He started his career at eBusiness consulting company Scient, first as a java developer and later engineering manager and co-founder of the wireless practice. He holds a BSE in Electrical Engineering from Princeton, a MS in Computer Science and an MBA from the Stanford Graduate School of Business.

Howie Xu

Howie Xu
Vice President of Engineering

Howie is a pioneer in the network virtualization industry and responsible for R&D at Big Switch Networks. Prior to Big Switch Networks, he spent more than nine years at VMware where he was responsible for VMware’s networking product direction and engineering team. He was instrumental in the establishment of the VMware/Cisco alliance and led the Nexus 1000V collaboration with Cisco from concept to fruition. He holds multiple patents in the area of virtual networking. Prior to VMware, he worked at a variety of established and start-up networking companies including Verizon and NFR. He holds a BSCS from Shanghai University and MSCS from Portland State University.

Dave Butler

Dave Butler
Vice President of Sales

Dave Butler has built and led sales organizations in networking, software, and supercomputer companies. He served as VP of Sales and Business Development at Aruba Networks, VP of International Sales and the Federal subsidiary at FORE Systems, VP of Sales at Berkeley Networks, VP of Sales at Fast Forward and most recently VP of Worldwide Sales at VSS Monitoring. Dave received a BS in Computer Science from Purdue University and an MS in Computer Science from the University of Virginia. He completed his graduate research at NASA’s Langley Research Center and received a technical commendation from the National Security Agency for his contribution during Desert Shield/Desert Storm.

Mansour Karam

Mansour Karam
Vice President of Business Development and Strategic Alliances

Mansour drives business development, strategic alliances, and the partner ecosystem at Big Switch Networks. Prior to Big Switch Networks, he was the first business hire at Arista Networks where he identified the key verticals and developed the early product, marketing, sales and partnership strategy. More recently, he was appointed to run business development for Arista where he built Arista’s partner ecosystem and strategic alliances. Prior to Arista, he was Principal Architect at RouteScience Technologies, which was acquired by Avaya in 2004. He holds more than 10 patents in networking technologies. He has an MS and Ph.D. in Electrical Engineering from Stanford University and a BEng in Computer Engineering from the American University of Beirut.

Jason Matlof

Jason Matlof
Vice President of Marketing

Jason started his career at Cisco in the mid-1990s, where he managed Cisco’s product management team for the company’s multi-billion dollar family of fixed-configuration Catalyst switches. Later, he was appointed VP of Marketing and Business Development at Neoteris, an early-stage network security start-up, where he developed the company’s product strategy and established market leadership within the emerging SSL VPN product category. After Neoteris was acquired, Jason served briefly as VP of Marketing for Remote Access Products at Netscreen and Juniper Networks. He was an early stage investor and Partner at Battery Ventures where he helped build eight early stage start-ups. Jason has a BA with honors from UCLA and an MBA from Harvard Business School.

Prashant Gandhi

Prashant Gandhi-Vice President of Product Management
Vice President of Product Management

Prashant joined Big Switch from Cisco where he was responsible for driving product strategy and management of the Cisco ONE Controller, Nexus 1000V virtual switch, VXLAN-based network virtualization as well as Cisco’s SDN and cloud network services product and go-to-market strategy.  He came to Cisco in 2009 through the acquisition of Rohati Systems where he was CEO and co-founder. At Big Switch, he oversees the company’s complete Open SDN Suite, which includes Big Network Controller, Big Virtual Switch, Big Tap and Switch Light, as well as Project Floodlight open source projects, including the Floodlight controller, Indigo and other applications contained with the project. He holds a PhD. in electrical engineering from the University of Pennsylvania.

Rob Sherwood

Rob Sherwood photo
CTO of Controller Technologies

Rob leads standardization and controller software architecture at Big Switch where he developed and evangelized the emerging OpenFlow standard and network virtualization. He is the current Chair of the ONF’s Architecture & Framework Working Group and all Northbound API activity and was vice-chair for the ONF Testing & Interoperability Working Group. Rob prototyped the first OpenFlow-based network hypervisor, the “FlowVisor”, allowing production and experimental traffic to safely co-exist on the same physical network and is involved in various standards efforts and partner and customer engagements. Rob holds a PhD in Computer Science from the University of Maryland, College Park.