What Happened?
San Jose, CA-based Cisco Appointed Zorawar Singh as Chief Technology Officer
About the Company
Cisco (NASDAQ: CSCO) is the worldwide leader in IT that helps companies seize the opportunities of tomorrow by proving that amazing things can happen when you connect the previously unconnected. At Cisco customers come first and an integral part of our DNA is creating long-lasting customer partnerships and working with them to identify their needs and provide solutions that support their success. The concept of solutions being driven to address specific customer challenges has been with Cisco since its inception. Husband and wife Len Bosack and Sandy Lerner, both working for Stanford University, wanted to email each other from their respective offices located in different buildings but were unable to due to technological shortcomings. A technology had to be invented to deal with disparate local area protocols; and as a result of solving their challenge - the multi-protocol router was born. Since then Cisco has shaped the future of the Internet by creating unprecedented value and opportunity for our customers, employees, investors and ecosystem partners and has become the worldwide leader in networking - transforming how people connect, communicate and collaborate.
About the Person
Zorawar Biri Singh joins Cisco as SVP, Chief Technology Officer, Platforms and Solutions. As a member of the Executive Leadership Team, Biri will drive thought leadership around Cisco`s long-term technology roadmap, platforms and architectures for the next era of digitization and beyond. He will work closely with Cisco’s engineering and broader CTO community to set the foundation for our long-term investments. He will also collaborate with our CSO organization to help align our technology strategy with our overall strategy and corporate development priorities. Previously, Biri was a venture partner at Khosla Ventures, where he focused on enterprise IT software, predictive data analytics, cloud platforms and infrastructure investments. Biri brings over 24 years of experience as a product centric founder, general manager and CEO at startups and Fortune 50 companies. He has diverse background in enterprise IT, having spent half his career as an entrepreneur building enterprise focused startups and the other half as a product leader at three companies, Hewlett Packard, IBM and Nortel Networks. Biri has extensive products and technical operations experience in cloud and data platforms, enterprise software, distributed computing, open source, devops and data center infrastructure. In his previous role, Biri was senior vice president and general manager of Hewlett Packard’s (HP) cloud business, where he oversaw the company’s global cloud portfolio and open source efforts. Prior to HP, Biri led corporate strategy and portfolio solutions as vice president of cloud computing at IBM and served as a member of the executive team that launched IBM’s cloud business unit in 2010. He joined IBM through its acquisition of Encentuate, a data security and access management startup, where he was CEO. Earlier in his career, Biri spent over a decade as the CEO of a number of different startups including Pivia, an application delivery startup that was acquired by F5 Networks. He served as the interim CEO at JRG, a SaaS company for consumer-packaged goods, which was acquired by Aptean, and at Crossweave, a software integration tools company, which was acquired by Amberpoint/Oracle. Biri also was the CEO at Idapta, a B2B startup, and COO of advertising tech company, RelevantKnowledgeMedia Metrix, which is now part of comScore. He began his career at Nortel Networks, where he held a variety of product development roles for multiple networking, software and consumer products. Biri holds a bachelor’s degree in economics from North Carolina State University and a master’s in business administration from the Kenan Flagler School of Business at the University of North Carolina. Biri currently lives in the San Francisco Bay Area with his wife and their two children. He is an avid reader, music fan and occasionally moonlights as caddycoach for his daughter’s junior golf tournaments, and is an itinerant DJ/producer.
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