In Transition

The 5 years of prolific run at Cisco has been most gratifying part of my career that was filled with transformation and disproportionate business impacts. I would like to express my gratitude to Ravi Chandra and Scott Harrell for hiring and trusting me with an important initiative?of leading platform independent protocols software and tools team of NOSs for Enterprise, Data Center, and MIG platforms.

While the list of accomplishments are way too many to capture, there are few that I am proud of the team. It all started with a radical mindset shift - better is better than the best, consistency at scale and democratization of information/talent. We strived hard every day to be a better version of ourselves. We used every opportunity to bring delight and serviceability improvements, whether it is a customer escalation, internal unreproducible defects or missed quality goal. We approached inclusion by paying attention to what we were consciously excluding whether it is people, process, tools or technology. We aspired to kill the bug mountain in development cycle when the need was to move it left. We focussed on proactive metrics and shaped the tools, and they shaped us. This gave birth to digitization of software development, sophisticated work flow and test automation frameworks. We were focussed on solution and use case completeness over features. This led to many unique customer design wins. We attracted back many smart talents that left us in the past. Significant majority of women talents had mentors and have their aspirations matched with opportunity as a part of proactive talent development and rotation. We had 30% representation in Cisco’s RFC and drafts. And the innovation we brought in EVPN, SR, Multicast, BGP scale and convergence, IGP, LISP, OAM and Automation is unparalleled to what was ever done in the past. All of these wouldn’t have been possible without active partnership and thought leadership of cross functional team, for which I am eternally grateful. On an average 70% of team members generated innovative ideas every year that up-leveled the solutions and the way we developed it. Innovation was our lifeline, we were multipliers and indeed ONE great team.

“Education is not the filling of a pail, but the lighting of a fire” - William Butler Yeats. I would like to take this opportunity to thank the following leaders for their partnership, sponsorship and support in lighting the fire in me. Jonathan Davidson , Roland Acra , Sumeet Arora , Ronak Desai , Will Eatherton , Rakesh Dubey , Soumya Viswanathan , Suhas Mansingh , Liz Centoni , Todd Nightingale , Christine Bastian , Puja Jaspal , Greg Tesimale , Mary Beth Wells , Rachel Haas , Brigitte Sly , Rick Knox , Helen Wong-Reynolds , Haroon Abdel-Rahman , Apoorva Karan , Nitin Kumar , Senthil Kenchiah , Laks Venkataraman , Danny Prairie , Sriram Sankaran , Prasanna Ganesan , Solomon Lucas , Sedy Yadollahi , Shyam Maniyar , Jimit Mehta , Ram Singh , Venu Venugopal , Amit Patel , Mahesh Chellappa , Kevin Wollenweber , Thomas Scheibe , Malathi Srinivasan , Ananthakrishnan R , Ravi Kiran Gurudath , Misha Nossik , Jillian Neilson , Kaushik Dam , Balaji Venkatraman , Balaji Thattai (TTB) , Chris O'Rourke , Arun Arunkumar , Clarence Filsfils , Pradeep Kathail , Pratap Pereira , Yousuf Khan , Carl Solder , Michael Shannon , Sonali Natarajan , Meghan Barker , Eeshita Grover , Ray Romney , Julie Hart , Krishna Sundaresan , David Goeckeler , Ted Kezios , Maria Poveromo , Sameer Gulrajani , Deniqua Crichlow , Rex Fernando , Anand Oswal , Suresh Sangiah , Venky Nanniyur , Anoop Vetteth , Sachin G. , Philippe Ciampossin , Rakesh Thaker , Vipul Deokar , Prasad Chebrolu , Robin J Gonsalves (Robbie Gonsalves) , Deepa Subbaiah B , Carlos Pignataro , Gregory Dorai , Chris Stori , Andy Schutz , Sesh Tirumala and many more that crossed my path at Cisco.