The chief technology officer and co-founder of Big Switch Networks is set to join Facebook next year.

Rob Sherwood has announced his departure from the data center networking company, in a post saying he wanted to spend more time in the lab.

To the naysayers

“I owe A LOT to SDN and to Big Switch, but I’ve made the difficult decision to go back to my roots. I want to be in a lab,” Sherwood said.

He added that he would remain a strategic advisor to Big Switch, a company which he felt had overcome naysayers and challenges to reach a crucial step in its journey. “SDN is no longer a crazy idea. It’s a real, viable technology that will forever change the face of networking and Big Switch is leading this disruption.

“Yes, there are still challenges to be solved for, there is still work to be done, but it’s no longer “if” the challenge can be solved for, it’s “how” the challenge can be solved for.”

Sherwood said that since he felt that Big Switch had now reached a stage in its life where its direction appeared positive, he wanted “to look at a seemingly unsolvable problem and prove the naysayers wrong, yet again.”

“In early 2017 I’ll be joining Facebook. It’s no secret that their network is growing at an incredible rate and I’m thrilled to have the opportunity to help Facebook’s world-class networking team solve for complex and massive challenges each day.”

Facebook has indeed become increasingly involved in the switch space, with its Wedge 100 recently accepted by OCP, and last month’s launch of the Backpack, which has also been submitted to the Open Compute Project.