Cisco continues to restructure internally

Five for fighting in Engineering, Strategic Technology

Cisco continues to tinker with its organizational structure, ever after completing a major restructuring begun last summer. This week, Cisco revamped its engineering operations to further streamline them and improve execution against company strategy, according to a blog on the Cisco site.

The blog states that the organizational refinement is intended to focus accountability on the groups, and align and simplify the reporting structure. To that end, Cisco formed five groups across engineering and five more strategic technology groups for consistency.

The five new engineering groups and their leaders are:

• The Enterprise Networking Group, which combines enterprise routing, campus switching, WAAS WAN optimization, wireless LAN and the networking elements of the Small Business group. It will be led by Rob Soderbery, heretofore Cisco's senior vice president and general manager, Unified Access Business Unit. Praveen Akkiraju, senior vice president and general manager, Network Services Technology Group, will continue to lead enterprise routing and wireless;
• Data Center will be led by David Yen, who jumped from Juniper earlier this year to lead the Server Access and Virtualization Technology Group. Yen will oversee data center switching, servers/storage and load balancing. John McCool, who had been senior vice president and general manager of the Core Technology Group, has been shifted over into sales in an as yet undisclosed "leadership position;"
• The Security and Government Group will be led by Chris Young, who recently joined Cisco from VMware, and will include the Security Technology Group, Global Government Solutions Group and Corporate Security Programs;
• Service Provider Networking, which includes Service Provider Routing and Service Provider Mobility, will be led by Surya Panditi. Kelly Ahuja, senior vice president, general manager and chief architect of the Service Provider Business, will continue to lead Service Provider Mobility;
• Video and Collaboration, which combines Collaboration and Communications, TelePresence Technology, Service Provider Video Technology and Emerging Technologies, will be led by Marthin De Beer. Cisco also melded the TelePresence Technology Group and the Collaboration & Communications Group into a single Collaboration Group led by Barry O'Sullivan, senior vice president and general manager, Collaboration and Communications Group. OJ Winge, senior vice president of the TelePresence Technology Group, will report to O'Sullivan and continue to lead the TelePresence business.

The five new Strategic Technology Group include the new Cloud and System Management Technology Group, led by CIO Rebecca Jacoby; Engineering and Operations and Systems, led by Joe Wojtal; Network Operating Software Technology Group, led by Ben Fathi; Silicon and Central Engineering, led by Bill Swift and Massimo Prati; and Research and Advanced Development, led by Joel Bion.

One can't help but notice that there may have been some demotions among the reorganization. Certainly, it looks as if Kelly Ahuja has been stripped of some responsibility in Service Provider. Winge, who appeared to be O'Sullivan's SVP peer, now reports to him. And O'Sullivan himself now leads a subgroup under fellow SVP De Beer, while Akkiraju is now tucked in under Soderbery's group. 

Perhaps we'll see the doors at Cisco continue to revolve with this latest realignment.

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• Personnel

• Restructuring

• Cisco organizational chart

• data center

• Enterprise