Cisco Systems Inc. is left without another one of its high-level executives, Jayshree Ullal, senior vice president of Cisco's Data Center, Switching and Services Group. Ullal announced her departure on Cisco's blog on Friday, saying that it was her own decision to leave, although she has no future plans yet.
In the past 15 months Cisco lost three of its top executives, although the company is in a continuous growth, on its way to becoming more of a generic IT vendor rather than a networking company. The first one to leave was Mike Volpi, senior vice president in charge of service providers and routing, in February last year, whereas in late December, the chief development officer, Charles Giancarlo, joined an investment firm.
"I think Cisco, as it becomes more of an IT vendor, needs to bring in some new talent", said Zeus Kerravala, an analyst at Yankee Group Inc. "You'll see more leadership changes at Cisco over the next couple of years." He also added that Cisco remained the strongest networking vendor, although the company has unveiled high plans of becoming a more generic IT vendor, so as to offer computing technologies and applications. "It's healthy for Cisco to have leadership changes as it transforms itself."
John McCool will be replacing Ullal and will be reporting directly to Cisco CEO John Chambers, as stated on the company's blog for Cisco's leadership. "Jayshree's contribution to the networking industry and the respect she garners across the organization ensures that she will always remain part of the extended Cisco family", wrote Elizabeth McNichols, director of corporate communications. "We wish you the best of luck, Jayshree... You will be missed."
In her post on the blog Ullal said that she had been with Cisco for 15 years, since 1993. She came as a part of Cisco's first acquisition of Crescendo Communications. Back then, Cisco was a router company, with under $1 billion in annual revenues. Today Cisco is a nearly $40 billion company and its presence can be noted in Enterprise Campus, Datacenters, Branch, Service Provider, Commercial and Consumer markets.
"With mixed feelings and much introspection I have come to my decision to leave Cisco after 15 great and memorable years. My loyalty and affection to Cisco, CEO John Chambers and my teams made this a very difficult and lengthy decision process.", Ullal said on the blog.
Ullal noted that there had been 1,500 patents generated by the teams under her directions, as well as market-leading data center technologies that have been introduced in the past few years. "Just last week, our innovations were awarded best of show at Interop for Nexus 7000 and WAAS. We also surpassed a cumulative of one million 10 gigabit ethernet ports across switches and routers, a key milestone of 10GE adoption in the Data Center", she wrote.
"It has been my privilege to lead this team and I have full faith in our future driving Cisco's vision for transforming the data center. As for the inevitable question of what I plan to do next, I hope to re-kindle passions for my "next new gig" this summer and make an informed decision later this year", were her last words on the blog.
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