Colin Doherty new president and CEO of optical packet transport vendor BTI Systems

Optical transport systems and cloud networking vendor BTI Systems has named Colin Doherty its new president and chief executive officer. He replaces Steve Waszak, who BTI Systems says is leaving for “personal reasons.”

Doherty will be responsible for all of BTI Systems’ corporate, business, and product operations worldwide. A 25-year veteran of the telecommunications industry, Doherty comes to BTI Systems from Arbor Networks, a security solutions provider. Doherty was named CEO of Arbor in 2009; during his tenure in that position the company was acquired by Danaher in 2010 and itself acquired Packetloop last year. Prior to his tenure at Arbor Networks, he was CEO of Mangrove Systems and held senior management, sales, and operations roles with NMS Communications and Nortel Networks.

“I’m thrilled to be joining BTI at such an exciting time for the company and the market,” Doherty said. “It’s a terrific match with my experience and expertise. I look forward to working with the tremendous team as well as its customers and partners.”

Waszak had served as BTI Systems’ president and CEO since 2010. He oversaw a significant expansion of the company’s product portfolio, including its Intelligent Cloud Connect initiative (see “Intelligent Cloud Connect from BTI Systems targets SDN-enabled cloud services”). BTI closed a $27 million financing round this past December, bringing to $60 million the amount of growth capital the company has raised since 2011. Investors include Bain Capital Ventures, BDC, Covington Capital, GrowthWorks, and additional strategic investors.

“BTI is experiencing the best growth and performance in the company’s history, delivering category-defining cloud networking solutions to some of the world’s fastest growing, most innovative and most demanding cloud and service provider customers, such as Equinix, Digital Realty, VK and a rapidly expanding list of others,” said Neil Ferris, chairman of BTI’s board. “We’re thrilled Colin is joining as CEO because he has a unique understanding of our market opportunity, the networking software space and top-tier carrier, cloud and data center customers. He brings an excellent track record of scaling growth businesses and we’re very excited that he’ll lead BTI's next phase of growth."

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