In a recent blog post written by Cisco CEO, Chuck Robbins, the company announced Cisco’s changing up its leadership once more, adding Jeetu Patel as the organization’s Head of Collab, Security, and Applications. Two independent sources familiar with the matter confirmed that Sri Srinivasan will leave his role as Head of Cisco Collaboration to take on a new focus with the company.
Zeus Kerravala, one of my two sources who went on record – he’s the Founder and Principal Analyst of ZK Research who said: “Sri’s coming back, but not as head of collaboration. After taking some time off, he’s going to take on a new role working on with Cisco-funded non-profits”
Srinivasan replaced Amy Chang, former EVP and General Manager of Cisco Collaboration who is also reported to have taken a leave of absence from the company after nearly two years with Cisco. Robbins wrote that Patel will join Cisco as its Senior Vice President and General Manager (official title) of its newly-formed security and applications business group, starting August 3, 2020. Robbins expanded on what Patel would do in the role recently created by Cisco, adding:
“In this new role, Patel will lead our efforts across our collaboration, security, and applications businesses to deliver a consistent, seamless experience for Cisco customers and end-users”
Patel will collaborate with Cisco’s four other engineering heads as part of the company’s new updated business structure announced back in March which focuses on enhancing emerging technologies and incubation. He brings more than 20 years of senior leadership experience in enterprise software development as well as building cloud-native applications.
Patel is former Chief Product Officer and Chief Strategy Officer of Box, where he led the company’s product strategy, vision for cloud content management, and the development of Box’s business unit. Last week at Cisco Live!, the collaboration giant’s annual developer conference, and first digital iteration, Robbins announced Cisco made updates to its security and compliance capabilities, along with added intelligent and actionable insights functionalities via a partnership with cloud-based content management platform ‘Box.’
Cisco may be looking to take Patel’s experience gained at Box where he worked closely to implement advanced artificial intelligence technologies to enhance its portfolio as well as to enhance user experience and the Webex platform’s navigability. During the COVID pandemic, many companies in the video conferencing, programmable API/CPaaS arena saw an uptick in usage in areas such as healthcare. Cisco is one of the collaboration giants riding the wave of old markets emerging as hotbeds. As such, Cisco freshly integrated with Epic’s medical software which houses 250,000,000 patient records.
Shifting to Cisco’s security enhancement, the collaboration firm expanded its end-to-end encryption options to include AES 256 Bit encryption with GCM for added protection for meeting data and against meeting intrusion. Cisco also ‘boosted’ the Cisco Webex Control Hub. Via the platform, IT teams can manage collaboration workloads, leverage analytics, and management tools for remote workers as well as a returning office-based workforce.
There’s even a new cloud-connected UC feature that aims to simplify IT workflows for hybrid deployments and expand Webex call analytics. Unlike its competitors in the team collaboration space, Microsoft and Slack, Cisco does not report how many users it has. Cisco did, however, report having 324 million people attend Webex meetings in March.
