The CEO of networking equipment manufacturer Brocade has announced his resignation. Michael Klayko, who has been CEO since 2005, will step down once a successor has been found.

Brocade announced Klayko’s resignation as it reported results a "great" financial quarter, in which revenues rose 10% year-on-year to $555 million. This is marked improvement from the previous quarter, in which revenues fell by 1%.

Klayko was the architect of Brocade’s move into the IP network switching business, the company having historically focused on storage network equipment. Having investigated the possibility of developing Brocade’s own Ethernet switch technology, Klayko instead decided to acquire Foundry Networks for $3 billion in 2008.

This move placed Brocade in a market dominated by Cisco. “Some people thought I was a little loose in the saddle,” Klayko said in an interview with Information Age earlier this year.

Storage networking equipment is still Brocade’s main business, and the IP division that Klayko masterminded has languished of late. However, in the latest quarter, the Ethernet switch business grew by 5% to $178 million.

In his interview with Information Age, Klayko said he was hopeful that the advent of OpenFlow, a software-defined networking protocol which allows businesses to build networks from multiple suppliers’ equipment, would open up the IP switching market.

"What it does is open up more of the market to compete on functionality and price performance," he said.

Earlier this week, Cisco CEO John Chambers dismissed the suggestion that his company’s near-monopoly of the IP switching business was threaten by SDN.