cisco
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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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Ashraf Karim
Ashraf Karim is Senior Vice President of Connected Customer Experiences & Technology at ServiceNow, where he leads the charge on transforming how enterprises engage customers through AI-powered digital workflows. With over two decades spanning engineering, product management, and executive leadership at Google, PayPal, Affirm, and Cisco, Karim bridges the gap between deep technical fluency and strategic business thinking. He is known for championing simplicity-first design, advocating that reducing cognitive load at every customer touchpoint is the defining discipline of great product leadership.
Christina Olmsted
Christina Olmsted is Vice President of AI and Data Center Marketing at NVIDIA, where she leads global marketing and PR teams at the epicenter of the AI revolution. With nearly a decade at NVIDIA and 15 years prior at Cisco, she built and championed campaigns that repositioned entire computing paradigms - from Cisco's Internet of Everything brand movement to NVIDIA's AI and accelerated computing narrative. A UC Berkeley dual-degree alumna with a flair for connecting technology to human impact, she operates at the intersection of deep technical product marketing and culture-shaping storytelling.
Alvin Nicolas
Alvin Nicolas is a technology professional at Webex, Cisco's enterprise collaboration platform headquartered in San Jose, California. With a career spanning telecommunications giants including MCI WorldCom, Microsoft, and Yipes Enterprise Services, Nicolas brings deep networking expertise to one of the world's leading collaboration and video conferencing platforms. He is associated with the AI Titans initiative at Webex, reflecting the company's aggressive push into AI-powered communications and collaboration tools.
Ayman Sayed
Ayman Sayed is President and CEO of BMC Software, the $2.3-billion enterprise software company serving 86% of the Forbes Global 50. He joined BMC in 2019 after senior roles at CA Technologies (President and Chief Product Officer) and Cisco (SVP, leading 2,500+ engineers). Under his tenure, BMC pivoted toward AI-driven IT automation under the 'Autonomous Digital Enterprise' framework, and in 2024 he announced a landmark split of BMC into two independent companies - one focused on mainframe software and one on digital services management.
Frank Calderoni
Frank Calderoni is a tech-industry lifer who spent a decade as Cisco's CFO, then jumped into the CEO seat at Anaplan in 2017, taking the connected-planning company through its 2018 IPO and a $10.7B sale to Thoma Bravo in 2022. He briefly ran Velocity Global, sits on Adobe's board as Lead Director, and wrote 'Upstanding,' a book arguing that company character is a competitive moat.
Joe Burton
Joe Burton is the Chief Executive Officer of Reputation, the San Ramon-based reputation experience management platform. A career technologist who started as a software engineer and was acquired into Cisco in 2001, he went on to lead Plantronics (later Poly) as CEO, then Telesign, before taking the helm at Reputation in October 2023. His operating range spans big data, machine learning, SaaS, unified communications, and IoT.
Rajiv Ramaswami
Rajiv Ramaswami is the President and CEO of Nutanix, the San Jose-based hybrid multicloud software company. An optical networking PhD who built a 30-year career at IBM Research, Nortel, Cisco, Broadcom and VMware before taking the top job at Nutanix in December 2020, he holds 36 patents and is a Fellow of the IEEE.
Kannan Kothandaraman
Kannan Kothandaraman is the Co-Founder and CEO of Selector AI, a Santa Clara-based AIOps and network observability platform that uses large language models, knowledge graphs, and causal reasoning to help Fortune 1000 enterprises detect, diagnose, and resolve infrastructure issues faster. Before founding Selector in 2019, Kannan spent nearly two decades at Juniper Networks - rising from senior software engineer to Vice President of Product Line Management - and before that at Cisco Systems. Selector has raised $104 million in total funding, including a $32M Series B in February 2026 at a valuation of $375 million, and counts Fortune 20 companies in manufacturing and healthcare among its customers.
Tarun Raisoni
Tarun Raisoni is the CEO and Co-Founder of Gruve, a Redwood City-based AI services company he launched in February 2024 after selling his previous venture, Rahi Systems, to Wesco International. Rahi Systems scaled to $500M+ in annual revenue across 25 countries with no external funding - then Tarun pivoted immediately to AI, co-founding Gruve with a mission to deliver outcome-based enterprise AI services. Within months, Gruve raised $87.5M in total funding, completed multiple acquisitions, grew to 500+ employees, and unlocked 500+ MW of distributed AI inference capacity across the United States. He is one of the rare founders who has built and exited multiple hundred-million-dollar companies and come back for more.
Vasili Triant
Vasili Triant is the CEO of UJET, an AI-powered cloud contact center platform backed by $183M in funding and built on Google Cloud. With over 20 years spanning Cisco, Serenova, LiveOps, and ShoreTel, he has navigated virtually every inflection point in enterprise communications - from on-premise PBX to cloud-native AI. Appointed sole CEO in April 2025 after serving as CBO, COO, and Co-CEO, Triant now leads UJET's push to reshape customer experience with agentic AI orchestration, deep CRM integration, and a mobile-first architecture that treats the smartphone as the default CX channel.