A New Day for Cisco’s Go-to-Market

When we announced the successful close of Cisco’s acquisition of Splunk on March 18, it marked the beginning of a new chapter for our company, our customers, and the market. Our complementary capabilities across security, observability, and data are going to help our customers improve their digital resiliency and maximize the massive opportunities in areas like AI.

At the same time, the demands of our customers are constantly evolving, and they need a strategic partner who can adjust to changing market conditions and help them achieve their most urgent outcomes. Over the last 40 years, Cisco has built one of most sophisticated and extensive Go-to-Market (GTM) engines in the industry. Today, we are taking the next step in that mission.

I am pleased to share that Gary Steele, the former CEO of Splunk who joined Cisco as part of the acquisition, will be stepping into the newly created role of President, Go-to-Market. In this role, Gary and his team will evolve our sales and Go-to-Market motions to execute against strategy, align with customer needs, and drive a culture of intense competition, agility, and continuous improvement. Gary’s new organization will include Cisco’s Sales, Partner, and Global Marketing teams.

Since officially joining Cisco two months ago, Gary has played an integral role in the integration of Splunk, which is absolutely vital to our future growth. To ensure we are successful in this mission, the Splunk team will remain reporting into Gary.

Gary brings over 30 years of experience and a proven track record of successfully scaling SaaS operations and growing multi-billion-dollar global enterprises. In his two years as Splunk’s CEO, Gary grew revenues by nearly 60%, including ARR growth of 35%, while driving a dramatic and successful company transformation and accelerated innovation across their portfolio. As the founding CEO of Proofpoint, Gary grew the company from an early-stage start-up to a leading, publicly traded company.

His operational mindset, combined with his intense focus on simplicity and proven ability to drive growth, position him well as the new leader of this organization. Representing the voice of the customer, he will build new processes, listening systems, and feedback loops to drive effective prioritization, decision-making, and alignment between our GTM and engineering teams.

As part of these changes, Jeff Sharritts, our current EVP and Chief Sales and Marketing Officer, will be leaving Cisco towards the end of our fiscal year in mid-July. Jeff is a 24-year Cisco veteran with a long list of accomplishments. Known for his authenticity and integrity, he is well respected at Cisco, and we are grateful for his leadership and unwavering dedication to Cisco, and our customers.

As we look ahead, I am extremely confident in our future and our ability to be the strategic partner our customers need to achieve their most pressing outcomes. With Splunk as a part of Cisco, we have unique and differentiated positions across AI, security, observability, data, and more. Our portfolio of solutions is coming together in new ways to solve challenges that were once deemed unsolvable.

I look forward to partnering deeply with Gary to make that happen and I’m grateful for Jeff’s many years of partnership and friendship.

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