It was always my intention to write my last blog post of the year about Cisco. Until about 9 PM last night, the subject was to have been a new emphasis on software that Cisco highlighted at its recent industry analyst event, C-Scape. While I will come back to that topic soon, the news of the day prompts me to write instead about Chief Development Officer Charlie Giancarlo's departure, announced after the market close on December 20th.
It was always my intention to write my last blog post of the year about Cisco. Until about 9 PM last night, the subject was to have been a new emphasis on software that Cisco highlighted at its recent industry analyst event, C-Scape. While I will come back to that topic soon, the news of the day prompts me to write instead about Chief Development Officer Charlie Giancarlo's departure, announced after the market close on December 20th.One of my first thoughts on reading the news was that a new Chief Development Council announced at C-Scape was created with the knowledge that Giancarlo would be leaving. This was confirmed in the press release issued by Cisco. Instead of one Chief Development Officer, there are now seven SVPs/GMs, each with product responsibility for a portion of Cisco's huge portfolio.
Don Proctor, who until mid-2007 had responsibility for the Voice Technology Group, is one of the seven. His scope of responsibility has expanded, and he now heads an organization called the Software Group. Under that umbrella is included Voice Technology Group, the Collaboration Software Group (WebEx), Network Software and Systems (the group that manages the Cisco operating system IOS), and Policy Management, created from the recently acquired Securent. As I said, I'll come back my thoughts on this new Software organization in a future blog.
Today the story is about Charlie. For years it had been clear that he was the heir apparent and at annual industry analyst events we saw his role gradually expand. While Chambers always set the pace from a corporate vision perspective, the techies among us came to look forward to the product roadmap outlined each year by Giancarlo. From an IT Telephony perspective, it was always interesting to see how little, or more recently how much, Giancarlo's talk would relate to communications.
One couldn't help but wonder what might change at Cisco when Giancarlo took over from Chambers, when a more product-centric executive took over from a more sales and marketing focused one. Now we'll never know.
Wait. Come to think of it, Giancarlo is headed to private equity firm Silver Lake. They jointly own Avaya with TPG Capital. Avaya's CEO Lou D'Ambrosio was the head of sales and marketing before being named CEO. Hmmmm.
