Lumina Networks expands engineering management to drive product innovation and open source leadership

by Ameena Syeda | Sep 17, 2018

Avinash Parwaney joins from Cisco to Lead Lumina Engineering; Prem Sankar Gopannan joins from Ericsson and Iyappa Swaminathan joins from Nuviso Networks to bolster open source project contribution and product line expansion

San Jose, Calif. – Sept 17, 2018 –Open source networking leader Lumina Networks today announced the addition of three industry leaders to their engineering team.  Avinash Parwaney joins Lumina’s executive team as VP of Engineering. Parwaney is formerly from Cisco where he was Senior Director of Engineering. Prem Sankar Gopannan has joined Lumina as Director of Engineering and Iyappa Swaminathan has joined as Director of Technical Product Management.

“I am pleased to welcome Avinash to lead the Lumina engineering team. He brings a wealth of real-world experience in large scale service provider networking,” said Andrew Coward, CEO of Lumina Networks. “Avinash will help Lumina accelerate our open source-based networking platforms and applications from proof of concept trials into production deployment. The addition of Prem and Iyappa to the team will further strengthen our ability to help lead the open source networking community, driving innovation and productization.”

As Senior Director of Engineering at Cisco, Avinash was responsible for the Service Provider Software portfolio, working directly with Cisco’s largest global customers to ensure successful operation. His efforts at Cisco have contributed to product line expansion into the billions of dollars annual run-rate. Avinash also serves as a board advisor at Vizru Inc., a startup focused on autonomous applications and workflow automation for enterprises.

Prem Sankar Gopannan joins Lumina from Ericsson where he was Principal Architect. Prem is well-known in the open source community, currently serving as project team lead for the Kubernetes Integration Project (COE) in OpenDaylight. Iyappa Swaminathan (Ayyaps) comes to Lumina from SDN supplier Nuviso Networks, where he served as a Vice President for Product Management and Head of India Operations. Ayyaps has prior engineering development experience at both Cisco and Juniper.

In May 2018, Lumina Networks raised $10 million in Series A Funding led by Verizon Ventures and joined by AT&T and Rahi Systems. The company announced its intention to use the funding to expand product engineering and geographic expansion.