Akanda on Wednesday announced it has appointed former Yahoo (YHOO) executive Mark McClain as the company’s founding CTO, effective immediately.

The San Francisco-based company provides a production-ready open source network virtualization platform for cloud services providers (CSPs). Akanda is considered to be the major developer and supporter behind the open source Akanda network virtualization software project.

The company said McClain will be in charge of leading the technical vision and development team. He will also spearhead efforts to engage with new contributors and develop broad community support for the Akanda open source project

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Prior to joining Akanda, McClain contributed to the strategic planning and architecture expansion of Yahoo’s OpenStack platform implementation as the company’s senior principal architect. He also held senior developer positions at DreamHost, Pictage and SignPost Networks. McClain is a member of the OpenStack Technical Committee and currently a core member of OpenStack Neutron.

“I have three immediate goals for this position,” McClain told Talkin’ Cloud in an interview. “My first goal is to make Akanda fully Layer-2 agnostic to enable operator choice. Second, to enable Akanda to support additional Layer-3+ services. Finally, to promote an open community around Akanda and to integrate Akanda with other open ecosystems such as OpenStack and OpenDaylight.”

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