Executive leadership changes to drive innovation, simplicity, and growth

Today, I am thrilled to share exciting changes to Cisco’s Executive Leadership Team that are designed to accelerate our innovation, drive greater simplicity, and double-down on our growth efforts.

Our world is becoming increasingly complex and unpredictable. At Cisco, we deliver innovation that helps our customers navigate the uncertainty, stay resilient and ahead of the curve, and solve some of their most complicated problems. With the rapid adoption of AI and other new technologies, we have the opportunity to solve critical customer and global issues that may have once seemed unsolvable. We are laser focused on these efforts, and we believe the changes we are sharing today will help us reach these faster and result in differentiated innovation, simplified experiences for our customers, partners, and teams, and long-term growth for Cisco.

Effective immediately, Liz Centoni will serve as our new Executive Vice President and Chief Customer Experience Officer, Thimaya Subaiya will become our new Executive Vice President of Operations, and Mark Patterson will expand his role as my Chief of Staff to become our new Executive Vice President and Chief Strategy Officer, leading Corporate Strategy, Corporate Development, and our Emerging Technology and Incubation efforts.

Liz Centoni, EVP and Chief Customer Experience Officer

In her 23 years at Cisco, Liz has been at the center of developing, executing, and evangelizing key Cisco technologies such as Cloud, Compute, and IoT. Most recently, she has served as our EVP, Chief Strategy Officer and GM of Applications.

As our EVP and Chief Customer Experience Officer, Liz will leverage her rich technical expertise and passion for customers to accelerate customer success and adoption across our portfolio. She will apply new and emerging technologies, particularly AI, to better serve our customers and partners and deliver unparalleled experiences in new and innovative ways.

Her commitment to customer advocacy and core belief in the power of technology will be an incredible foundation for her success in this new role.

As part of this, Alistair Wildman, who has led our CX organization over the past year, will work with Liz in an advisory capacity before embarking on his next step. During his time leading our CX organization globally and for EMEA, Alistair has built a world-class team and we have been very fortunate to have his leadership over the past six years.

At this time, the Cisco Observability portfolio, inclusive of Full Stack Observability (FSO) and Cisco AppDynamics, will continue under Liz’s leadership.

Thimaya Subaiya, EVP, Operations

Thimaya will serve as our new EVP of Operations. Since joining Cisco six years ago, he has led our CX organization, and spent the last year as our Chief Transformation Officer, leading a company-wide effort to accelerate our strategic shift to more software and subscriptions. A critical part of his charter was to streamline our processes, simplify our tools for productivity, and make it easier for our customers and partners to do business with us. Through this work, Thimaya has an extensive and unique understanding of what is required to achieve success.

In his new role, Thimaya will take his experience leading CX and transformation efforts at Cisco and operational expertise at previous companies, to evolve and implement our capabilities across Cisco – balancing innovation, simplicity, and optimization to drive scale, expansion, and growth. His ability to build relationships across large organizations, influence and understand stakeholders, and bring them along to accelerate change will lead to greater efficiency, productivity, and simplicity in our Operations.

Mark Patterson, EVP and Chief Strategy Officer

Mark joined Cisco over 23 years ago and has been a business partner to me personally for more than 17 years. He currently serves as my Chief of Staff where he leads corporate planning and critical, high-growth cross-company initiatives.

In this expanded new role, we will bring together Mark’s current organization with our Corporate Strategy, Corporate Development, and Incubation efforts to drive Cisco’s growth strategy through acquisitions, strategic partnerships, investments, co-development, and innovation. This will help us move quickly to capture opportunities that better both our portfolio and our business. Bringing these teams together will also further align our organic and inorganic innovation efforts with our overall strategy with a laser focus on growth and simplicity.

Mark’s industry knowledge, background in finance and strategy, and deep customer relationships across the globe make him the right leader for this organization.

Focus on the Future

I have no doubt that these three leaders will bring fresh perspectives and innovative thinking to their new roles to accelerate what’s going well and identify and adjust where changes are needed. Change is certainly not new to Cisco as we have fundamentally revamped our business model, let go of outdated legacies, and are always looking at how we evolve to best serve the needs of our customers.

We are very fortunate to be a part of some of the most exciting technological revolutions in our history, and our collective belief that the innovation we build can make the impossible possible is what fuels us. I am excited to see all that Liz, Thimaya, and Mark, along with their teams, will achieve as we drive growth for Cisco and unparalleled experiences for our customers, partners, and people.

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