Cisco Exit: Global Marketing Director Takes CMO Post At Virtustream

The global marketing lead for Cisco's cloud, mobility and service provider data center businesses has left Cisco to take the top marketing post at cloud provisioning start-up Virtustream.

Simon Aspinall, who spent more than a decade at Cisco and was most recently senior director, marketing, was this week confirmed as Virtustream's chief marketing officer, where he'll drive strategic marketing for the company's xStream cloud product suite and software Infrastructure-as-a-Service platform.

Aspinall had been in his current role at Cisco since 2009, and before that headed up Cisco's business development and consulting team in the European telecom market. From 2002 to 2007 he was worldwide director for the mobile team in Cisco's Internet Business Solutions Group.

His departure from Cisco is the latest example of a continuing talent exodus from the networking titan, which spent most of 2011 in restructuring mode and has lost some of its best-known marketing, sales and channel-facing executives in the past year and a half.

[Related: Hits Keep Coming: 10 More Notable Cisco Executive Departures ]

Virtustream, which owns and operates cloud data centers in the U.S. and the United Kingdom, has been active in the cloud acquisition land grab. The company in December bought Enomaly, a cloud software player, and has received nearly $50 million in venture capital funding since its founding in 2008.

Rodney Rogers, Virtustream's chairman and CEO, praised Aspinall's marketing acumen and said Aspinall understands "the revolutionary nature of what Virtustream is accomplishing."

"His expertise in creating marketing strategies for complex technology offerings is critical to our 2012 strategy as we continue to enhance the capability of the xStream cloud platform and develop new solutions for enterprise and service provider customers," Rogers said in a statement.