By Jeff Caruso
Network World, 12/24/01

It was May 2000, and Mario Mazzola was counting the days to his retirement. His co-workers had thrown a retirement party for him. Cisco had issued a press release three months earlier, stating he would be "sorely missed" as senior vice president of the network giant's enterprise line of business.

Mazzola had been instrumental in building that business to the point where Cisco fully dominated the enterprise market, with a large base of loyal customers. All it had to do was continue milking the cash cow. At 54, Mazzola figured he could go out on top, and do what so many dream about: Spend more time with his family.

Then he brought the youngest of his three children, Francesca, to the office as part of a bring-your-child-to-work day, and she observed that her father was well-liked and well-respected at Cisco. "Everybody knows you," she said to him. "Why do you want to leave?"

Mazzola didn't have a good answer. He already had doubts about retiring, as he realized that engineering was in his blood. If not working with other engineers to build something useful and valuable - well, what exactly would he do with his time?

So he stayed, serving as senior vice president of new business ventures until he became chief development officer earlier this year following Cisco's reorganization into 11 major technology groups. In this capacity, he coordinates development efforts across all groups.

It's a new kind of role for Mazzola, where he has to find synergies across a broad product line and direct the massive development resources available to Cisco. In the past, he had been comfortable leading smaller teams working in smaller markets. "It's easier to build something from scratch, rather than work with existing business situations," he says. But given his experience, co-workers agree he's the right man for the job.

From Sicily to the Silicon Valley

Born in the Calabria region of Italy and raised in Sicily, Mazzola's first engineering job was at Olivetti in the 1970s, helping to design CPUs and storage subsystems. Partnerships with Intel and others brought him to Silicon Valley, where he and some peers got the idea to combine voice and data on the same infrastructure. With backing from Olivetti and venture capital firms, Mazzola co-founded David Systems in 1982 to pursue that goal - one that companies are still working toward today. "It was a little bit premature," he admits.

He left in 1990 to start and head Crescendo Communications, a LAN switching company that developed an encoding scheme later used as the base for Fast Ethernet and for transmitting FDDI over copper.

Crescendo attracted the attention of Cisco, which in 1993 was looking to expand beyond its router heritage into the fast-growing area of LAN switching. Cisco told the company it saw LAN switching as a potential core technology - and the two companies could work together or compete. The $93 million purchase of Crescendo was the first of many acquisitions Cisco would make over the next eight years.

For Mazzola, accepting the offer was a bit of a leap of faith. He received assurances that his team would have a good deal of latitude to build the LAN switch business within Cisco. He insisted that Crescendo's 62 employees keep their jobs at Cisco for at least two years. Mazzola's commitment to his employees is a hallmark of his character, and co-workers say they regard him as a friend as well as a manager.

But ultimately, it was still difficult to give up his baby, recalls longtime co-worker Jayshree Ullal, vice president of Cisco's optical network group. "There was an emotional feeling of loss, even though logically we knew it made sense for both Crescendo and Cisco," she says.

A Catalyst for LAN switching

Guided by thorough market research and a pragmatic approach to technology, Mazzola helped build the Catalyst family of switches into a powerhouse. He did so in part by championing the acquisitions of other companies, including Kalpana, Grand Junction and Granite Systems. Without falling in love with a technology for its own sake, Mazzola can spot opportunities, says Charles Giancarlo, senior vice president and general manager of technology development at Cisco. For example, Mazzola saw that the Catalyst 6500 could be used not only for enterprise backbones, but also for service providers, data centers and wiring closets.

This pragmatism will serve him well in his new role. Mazzola now has the power to change, duplicate or cross-purpose development efforts and to fill the gaps in integration across product lines that resulted from Cisco's acquisition-heavy strategy. "Developing new technologies, products and solutions has always been a passion for me," he says.

Just don't tell him it's time to retire.