Hammerhead names CTO

Hammerhead Systems named Richard Gitlin its new chief technology officer today.

Gitlin is the former CTO of NEC Labs America and a longtime employee of Lucent Technologies’ Bell Labs, serving at one point as CTO of Lucent’s data networking business unit. He also taught electrical engineering at Columbia University.

The four-year-old equipment vendor hopes to make use of two particular areas of Gitlin’s expertise that are relevant to its business: wireless and data networking. A holder of 43 U.S. patents, Gitlin contributed to the development of DSL and the first DSL chipsets as well as multicode CDMA and the BLAST broadband wireless system.

Company co-founder John Yu gave up his role as CTO in 2004.

Fresh from a $30 million funding round last week, Hammerhead has plans to increase its 80-person workforce at least 25% this year, adding sales, engineering, support and operations staff.

The company claims to have won two large American customers with its so-called “Layer 2.5 aggregation” products, which use pseudowire technology to transport Ethernet and other layer 2 traffic across carrier networks. One customer is a tier-one carrier, the other is tier-two, Hammerhead said, but both have international presence and will deploy Hammerhead’s gear in other countries once the vendor develops support for international traffic types such as SDH.

Though the company has an OEM partnership with Fujitsu Network Communications for North America, it is currently looking for a partner to sell its gear outside the U.S.