Anagran names new CEO

Edge router start-up Anagran today named as its new chief executive officer Kim Niederman, a former sales vice president at Polycom.

Having most recently served as senior vice president of worldwide sales for Polycom, a conferencing systems vendor, Niederman was also formerly the CEO of both Longboard, a supplier of SIP-based mobile applications, and Magellan Network Systems, a vendor of Excel-programmable switches. He also held various positions at Cisco Systems in the early 1990s and holds a bachelor’s degree in political science from the University of Denver.

As CEO, Niederman replaces Lawrence Roberts, a longtime veteran of the packet networking world, who helped create ARPANET, one of the first packet-based networks, and founded Caspian Networks, another core router vendor. Roberts will remain Anagran’s chairman and, he said in a statement today, “focus on continuing to advance the state of our flow-based technology and products.”

Anagran’s “flow-based” routers identify streams of related packets rather than individual packets in an attempt to enable greater efficiency and speed, allowing carriers to prioritize and discriminate traffic types. But whereas Caspian focused on core networks, Anagran launched this summer with a focus on the edge.