Rob
Let me
first say that I haven’t actually spoken to Cisco on the topic, but I find the
news of the new CTO to be very interesting. It was recently announced that Padmasree
Warrior would be coming over from Motorola. And just a few days later, the
announcement came out regarding the change in its development
organization.

Why all
the changes? Well I can only speculate, but I think Padmasree can help in two
major ways:

  1. The effort to free
    Charlie Giancarlo up some more.     I realize he is the “Chief
    Development Officer,” but he has basically continued the role and responsibility
    of a CTO. I think this is an attempt to get him some technical reprieve so as to
    enable him to focus on the eventual succession of John Chambers.
  2. The need to seriously
    figure out its consumer strategy.     The addition of Warrior will
    continue the executive level support for Cisco’s consumer technology
    (Giancarlo’s previous experience with Linksys), but adds much needed attention
    to the Scientific Atlanta portion of the house, where Moto was the top
    competitor.

I’m
definitely looking forward to C-Scape next week to see how they tie together all
these organization changes. Hopefully our 2008 predictions
are accurate, but regardless, it should be an interesting year for
Cisco.

I’d
love to hear comments and thoughts form readers though. Is this part of
succession planning? Is it a subtle move to push a stronger consumer
strategy?

By Robert Whiteley

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