Cisco announces new CEO’s executive team, more departures

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Cisco this week announced its leadership team under new CEO Chuck Robbins and three more high-level executives leaving the company.

Robbins’ leadership team includes 10 executives, nine from inside Cisco and one from outside the company. Several current officials are being elevated to or assigned new responsibilities.

Leaving the company are Wim Elfrink, executive vice president for industry solutions and chief globalisation officer; Edzard Overbeek, senior vice president of services; and Padmasree Warrior, CTO and chief strategy officer.

Elfrink will retire 25 July when Cisco’s 2015 fiscal year ends and the day before Robbins assumes leadership of the company. Warrior and Overbeek will serve as strategic advisers until September and for a year, respectively.

They join Cisco Presidents Rob Lloyd and Gary Moore whose positions were eliminated this week. Robbins is dismantling most of the leadership team assembled by predecessor and current CEO John Chambers, who is stepping down as CEO on 26 July after 20 years to become executive chairman.

Robbins wasn’t expected to detail his leadership team until mid-June but a Cisco spokesperson said he accelerated the announcement. The team is:

• Ruba Borno, vice president of growth initiatives and chief of staff
• Mark Chandler, senior vice president and general counsel
• Joe Cozzolino, senior vice president, services
• Chris Dedicoat, senior vice president, worldwide sales
• Rebecca Jacoby, senior vice president, operations
• Francine Katsoudas, chief people officer
• Kelly Kramer, executive vice president and chief financial officer
• Pankaj Patel, executive vice president, chief development officer
• Hilton Romanski, chief technology and strategy officer
• Karen Walker, chief marketing officer

A Cisco spokesperson said Robbins is also keen on adding external talent to fuel key growth areas, such as security, mobility, data centre, Internet of Everything and cloud.

The spokesperson said Cisco’s star spin-in engineers – Mario Mazzola, Prem Jain, Luca Cafiero and Soni Jiandani, some or all believed to be leaving later this year – continue to focus on ramping the company’s new application centric infrastructure product line. The spokesperson noted that incentives tied to Insieme would continue through Cisco’s fiscal year 2017 but would not comment on the future for these officials at Cisco.

Network World

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