cisco
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RYO Agency makes big technology a human story
A map, a racing game, an engineer with something to say. The agency behind years of Cisco campaigns has a practical answer to a familiar problem: getting people to care about complicated technology.
Samra Anees Learned to Read Technology. Now She Helps Shape How Carta Tells Its Story.
A cognitive science graduate became a technology analyst, found her footing in marketing at Cisco, then chose the useful discomfort of a new market at Carta. Her career is a study in curiosity made operational.
Girish Parekh Keeps Cisco's Sales Ambition on Speaking Terms With the Numbers
A chemistry graduate became a chartered accountant, learned transactions at Arthur Andersen, spent 15 years inside GE and arrived at Cisco in 2016. Today, Girish Parekh works where forecasts, new business models and a global sales organization must agree.
Splunk Made Machine Data Searchable. Cisco Paid $28 Billion for What Comes Next.
The software started as a Google-like search box for baffling server logs. Two decades, 20,000 customers and one enormous acquisition later, Splunk is trying to make security and operations teams faster without making every byte take the expensive route through its index.
Angela Stark Knows the Brand Is Only as Strong as the Work Behind It
After nearly three decades shaping enterprise technology brands, Angela Stark has arrived at a smaller, faster company with a very large question: can disciplined marketing help turn hourly jobs into good jobs? Her answer begins with clarity, connection and a willingness to do the unglamorous miles.
Jesse Lindeman’s Second Act Is Built on First Impressions
After shaping enterprise mobility at MobileIron and Apple, Jesse Lindeman turned from managing phones to managing the messy work between a dated house and its sale.
Humayun Sohel Built the Invisible Systems - Then Built a Business Around Them
Before cloud migration became a boardroom phrase, Humayun Sohel was working closer to the machine. His path from embedded systems and optical-network firmware to Questivity offers a useful lesson in turning technical depth into practical judgment.
Abhay Kulkarni Bet the Breach Happens After Login
After scaling clouds for tens of millions of users, Abhay Kulkarni returned to cybersecurity with a stubborn question: why do defenses stop watching at the moment an identity gets in? WideField followed the session instead - all the way back to Cisco.
Enrique Tapia Built Cisco's AI Marketing Team From Zero
He walked into Cisco with a mandate and no team. A few years later, marketing strategy at an 87,000-person company runs on the AI group he built out of nothing.
Prashanth Shenoy Is Selling the Cloud Back to the Data Center
After 22 years at Cisco, an engineer-turned-marketer walked into VMware just before its ownership changed. Now Prashanth Shenoy has the delicate job of making private cloud feel like the practical future, not a retreat to the past.
Mala Anand
Mala Anand is Executive Vice President and Chief Customer Experience Officer at Microsoft, leading the Customer Experience & Success division. A 25-year technology veteran who immigrated from Mumbai at 17 on a Rotary Youth Exchange Scholarship, she has shaped enterprise software at Cisco, SAP, and Microsoft, driving AI-powered transformations that measurably improve how customers get support. She is also executive sponsor of Women at Microsoft and an independent board director at Agilent Technologies.
Hideo Esaka Sells the Data That Runs Every Car You Never Think About
He trained in physics and psychology, then spent 25 years learning to explain complicated software to the people who buy it. At Solera, the product is the data quietly steering the auto and insurance industries.
The $9 Billion Race to Replace the Call Center
Eight software companies - from enterprise giant Genesys to a startup called CloudTalk - are betting the phone call survives. They just disagree on whether a human will still answer it.
The Contact Center Turned Into an AI Battleground in 2025
Talkdesk crashed the leaders' circle, Content Guru now stands alone as a challenger, Cisco slipped, and 8x8 vanished from the map. Gartner's 2025 CCaaS ranking is really a story about AI eating the call center.
UJET Is Quietly Coming for the Call Center Giants
The San Francisco startup put a Cisco veteran in the CEO chair, raised $76 million, and decided the best contact center is the one you never have to sit in.
Cisco
The company that quietly wired the internet is now betting its next chapter on securing and connecting the machines that run artificial intelligence.
Shubham Palriwala
Shubham Palriwala is the co-founder and CEO of Agnost AI (YC S26), a startup building the self-improving layer for AI agents in production. A backend engineer by trade, he was the youngest engineer on Cisco's analytics team and the first hire at open-source survey company Formbricks before teaming up with childhood friend Parth Ajmera to read production AI conversations and automatically ship fixes back to the agents that generate them.
Sudeep Goswami
Sudeep Goswami is the CEO of Traefik Labs, the open-source company behind the widely used Traefik Proxy and the cloud-native API gateway platform Traefik Hub. He stepped into the top job on February 1, 2024, after serving as Chief Revenue Officer, with founder Emile Vauge moving to CTO. Goswami's career spans roughly 25 years across software engineering, network design, product management, marketing, and sales, with earlier stops at Cisco, Cumulus Networks (acquired by Nvidia), Tempo Automation, and Very Good Security. He is known for translating deep infrastructure engineering into commercial growth for developer-focused companies.
Ché Wijesinghe
Ché Wijesinghe is the CEO of Cape.ai (formerly Cape Privacy), a New York and Halifax based company that builds AI for confidentially processing sensitive data across vision, voice and language models. A 25-year veteran of the enterprise software industry, he has led field operations and revenue at data and analytics companies including Cisco, Composite Software, OmniSci/HEAVY.ai and Neokami before taking the helm at Cape, where he has steered the company from an encrypted machine learning platform toward AI tools for document validation, compliance and financial services.
Raju Datla
Raju Datla is a serial entrepreneur and CEO of Fabrix.ai (formerly CloudFabrix), an AI-native IT operations platform he founded in 2015. Before Fabrix.ai, he sold two companies to Cisco - Jahi Networks (~$16M, 2004) and Cloupia ($125M, 2012), the latter becoming the foundation of Cisco's UCS management suite. At Fabrix.ai, he is pioneering Agentic AI for enterprise IT operations through a Robotic Data Automation Fabric that unifies data ingestion, AI agent orchestration, and workflow automation at scale.
ComputerLand of Silicon Valley
ComputerLand of Silicon Valley (legally CCT Technologies Inc.) is a San Jose-based technology solutions provider and value-added reseller founded in 1991. Over three decades it grew from a storefront computer sales-and-service shop into a full-service IT partner delivering cloud, cybersecurity, managed services, network infrastructure, virtualization, unified communications and IT logistics to government agencies, K-12 and higher-education institutions, and commercial businesses across California and beyond. A longtime approved E-Rate and NASPO ValuePoint reseller and Microsoft authorized education reseller, the company was acquired by cloud and cybersecurity firm ISSQUARED Inc. on May 1, 2024.
Nick Grewal
Nick Grewal is the founder, chairman and CEO of ePropelled, a Laconia, New Hampshire company building smart-propulsion and energy-management systems for drones, marine craft, and light electric vehicles. He founded ePropelled in 2018 after selling his previous startup Nashoba Networks to Cisco Systems for roughly $100 million in 1996 and spending two decades as an angel investor in more than 40 high-tech companies. He was inducted into the 2025 Boston Smart Business Dealmakers Hall of Fame.
Nitay Milner
Nitay Milner is co-founder and CEO of ORION Security, a New York and Tel Aviv-based startup rebuilding data loss prevention around AI that learns how data actually moves inside a company. He raised a $32M Series A led by Norwest in February 2026, with IBM participating, less than a year after a $6M seed. Before ORION he was a senior product leader at Epsagon (acquired by Cisco for around $500M) and previously co-founded DatsMi, an event-media startup.
SmarTrak.ai
SmarTrak.ai is an AI-native sales engine built by Cisco partners for Cisco partners. It unifies fragmented install-base data pulled from 30-40 sources across Cisco, distributors, partners, and customers, then turns it into prescriptive intelligence that tells channel partners what to sell, when to sell it, and how to grow adoption. Instead of static dashboards, the platform surfaces renewals, upsell gaps, and expansion opportunities so sales, customer success, and operations teams work from a single view of recurring revenue.
Diya Mathew
Diya Mathew is a Senior Manager for Customer Engagement Strategy in the Office of the President & COO at ServiceNow, the enterprise cloud platform company valued at over $100 billion. A graduate of Duke University's Fuqua School of Business and NIT Tiruchirappalli, she brings a rare blend of technical depth and strategic acumen forged across Cisco, Deloitte Consulting, Meta, and now ServiceNow. Based in San Francisco, she works at the intersection of executive strategy, customer engagement, and enterprise operations.
Jahangir Mohammed
Jahangir Mohammed is a serial entrepreneur and inventor who built Jasper Technologies into the world's largest IoT platform - sold to Cisco for $1.4 billion in 2016 - then turned his attention to metabolic disease. As Founder and CEO of Twin Health, he is using AI-powered whole-body digital twin technology to reverse chronic conditions like Type 2 diabetes, with clinical results published in the New England Journal of Medicine Catalyst showing 71% of participants achieving A1C below 6.5% while eliminating most medications. Twin Health has raised $335 million total and reached a $950 million valuation in 2025.
Bimohit Bawa
Bimohit Bawa is the co-founder and CEO of TrueCare24, a San Francisco-based health and wellness marketplace that connects families and employers with vetted nurses, caregivers, and clinicians for in-home care, telehealth, and on-site COVID-19 testing and vaccination. A software engineer by training - IIT Roorkee, a master's from the University of Pennsylvania, and an MBA from Berkeley Haas - Bawa spent nearly a decade building systems at Cisco and ServiceSource before joining TrueCare24 as its founding technical lead in 2015. He has since steered the company through 500 Startups' accelerator, a pivot into pandemic-era testing logistics, and a current chapter rebuilding senior care around AI and automation.
Issac Roth
Issac Roth is a Silicon Valley founder, operator and investor who has spent 25-plus years turning hard infrastructure into products developers actually use. He created Red Hat OpenShift out of his startup Makara, was founding CEO of the Node.js company StrongLoop (acquired by IBM, where he became a cloud CTO), and invested as a Venture Partner at Shasta Ventures. Today he is co-founder and CEO of Orama, an open-source search and answer-engine company building a fourth-generation database that fuses full-text search, vector search and built-in LLMs to power AI agents and copilots.
PrideVel Consulting LLC
PrideVel Consulting LLC is a Naperville, Illinois-based IT services and consulting firm that has spent two decades as an SAP Services Partner and a global professional-services partner for Cisco. The company helps mid-size and large North American enterprises run S/4HANA and SAP HANA migrations, cloud infrastructure, IoT and mobile projects, leaning on proprietary automation (ABAP optimization, BW migration) and a 'Rapid Business Solutions' plus Design Thinking method it says cuts cost and time-to-market by roughly 40%. More recently PrideVel has repositioned its website around 'The Control Layer for Enterprise AI,' extending its SAP-and-cloud heritage toward AI governance and chatbots.
Questivity
Questivity is a Santa Clara IT infrastructure integrator and training house. Founded in 1999, it designs, deploys, and supports the unglamorous plumbing of enterprise technology - networking, security, servers, storage, and virtualization - for mid-size and large organizations, and runs a parallel learning arm that hires, trains, and deploys engineers in Cisco, VMware, and data center disciplines. Its pitch is vendor-neutral: solve the client's problem with the right gear, on budget, rather than whatever a single manufacturer is selling.