Vyatta Marketing Chief Exits Company
A spokesperson did not provide additional details but did confirm Roberts has left Vyatta. On Tuesday, Roberts' bio and photo were removed from Vyatta's executive profiles page on its Web site.
Roberts could not be reached for comment Wednesday morning.
Roberts was among the key executives driving Vyatta, which since its founding in 2005 has grown a channel of more than 150 partners worldwide on the back of its open-source-based networking software and hardware.
Vyatta, which means "open" in Sanskrit, has positioned itself as a low-cost, flexible alternative to Cisco and other proprietary networking systems. Its products work with standard x86 hardware but also various virtualization and cloud platforms.
"With proprietary networking, if a customer or partners wanted to make enhancements and tweaks, we would have to build it. What is unique and interesting with Vyatta is they can do it themselves," said Roberts in a January 2009 interview with ChannelWeb.
Roberts more recently discussed breakthrough networking technologies at Interop New York in November, alongside executives from Juniper and Arista Networks.
In one not-so-veiled swipe at Cisco, Vyatta in October unveiled a promotion called "Gross Profit -- Sweet Savings," in which Vyatta customers could for a brief period purchase Vyatta subscriptions or appliances at a discount. That discount, Vyatta said at the time, would be calculated based on Cisco's gross profit margin stemming from what Cisco reported on its Q1 2010 earnings call.
Cisco will announce its second-quarter earnings Wednesday afternoon after markets close, but Vyatta did not confirm at press time whether it would re-up the promotion for Cisco's Q2 2010 gross profit margin.