Nortel fills CTO post

Nortel Networks named John J. Roese its new chief technology officer today, filling in the final gap in a senior management team that has been remade in recent months.

Roese was most recently the CTO of networking technologies for broadband integrated circuit vendor Broadcom, which employs nearly 4,300 people (about a tenth the size of Nortel) and reported $2.67 billion in revenue for 2005. Before that, he was executive vice president and CTO at Enterasys Networks, which sells communications equipment to large enterprises. He was also CTO of Cabletron Systems, which spun off part of its business to create Enterasys in 2000. At both Enterasys and Cabletron, he spearheaded the creation of network security offerings.

Roese is listed as the inventor on 16 granted and pending patents in policy management, location-based networking and other communications areas, Nortel said. He holds a Bachelor of Science degree in Electrical Engineering from the University of New Hampshire.

When Roese begins work on June 28, he will be responsible for directing Nortel’s research and development strategy and execution, working closely with the chief strategy officer hired earlier this year.

In a statement released today by Nortel, Chief Executive Officer Mike Zafirovski hailed Roese as a “technology visionary and a results-oriented leader” who will “become the spiritual leader for our more than 12,000 engineers and developers.” He also called the announcement “the final appointment to my senior leadership cabinet.”

Nortel had been without a CTO since former Cisco Systems executive Gary Kunis left the company (along with Chief Operating Officer Gary Daichendt) about a year ago after only three months on the job.