Here's the Email Cisco's CEO Just Sent To The Troops To Announce A Big Reorg

On Monday, Cisco's new CEO Chuck Robbins announced that he is reorganizing the company's massive engineering unit into four new teams to match with the areas he sees as most critical.
The new units are:

•     Networking
•     Cloud Services & Platforms
•     Security
•     Applications & IoT

All of the unit leaders will report directly to Robbins.

It's another reorg for engineering, which employs about 25,000 people, after a huge one was completed under John Chambers and engineering leader leader Pankaj Patel in the fall of 2014. That reorg was part of the company's 8,000-job layoff that year.

For the most part, Robbins is shuffling around current execs from the new slate he chose when he took over the CEO job last summer.

But there are a couple of exceptions.

The details

Kelly Ahuja, an 18-year Cisco veteran most recently running Cisco's service provider business, is out.  Yvette Kanouff will take over "an expanded Service Provider organization" as part of the networking organization reporting, for the moment to Patel.

Cisco's SP unit has been a sore spot for years and Robbins has already been been dismantling it. One of his first acts was to divest John Chambers $6 billion acquisition of set-top box Scientific-Atlanta. Cisco sold it for $600 million.

Networking will continue to report to Patel for the time being, but Patel already announced in January that he's leaving Cisco in the second half of the year. Patel had a stellar career under former CEO John Chambers. So looks like that mostimportant slot as leader of networking will be up for grabs in a few months.

David Goeckeler will continue to lead Cisco's Security business, and will now report directly to Chuck Robbins.

Rowan Trollope will continue to lead IoT & Applications and will now report directly to Chuck Robbins. Robbins sees IoT as one of Cisco's biggest and most promising new markets.



Zorawar "Biri" Singh, one of Robbin's new hires will lead the newly formed Cloud Services & Platforms organization.

Singh previously hailed from HP where, some years ago, he tried to help HP build a cloud business. That didn't go well. He left HP in around 2013 and last year HP exited the cloud market altogether and is now a reseller for Microsoft Azure.

Liz Centoni will be promoted to SVP and will lead the Computing Systems Product Group

One business unit is still a powerful island

Singh is being asked to "work closely with the Insieme leaders."
Insieme is the unit in charge of Cisco's most important networking product, its flagship Nexus 9000 switch and its "software defined networking" software.

This is the product that allows Cisco to compete with the SDN trend that threatens to eat its lunch.

Interestingly, a lot of people inside the company say that the Insieme unit, which is run by legendary engineers Mario Mazzola, Prem Jain, and Luca Cafiero, still basically reports to John Chambers, their long-time former CEO and the man that set up the unusual "spin-in" system that funneled billions to their projects (and millions to their pockets). Chambers is still Cisco's executive chairman, and he reports to CEO Robbins.

We heard that Mazzola was expected to announce his retirement in January as well, but he hasn't. Mazzola, Jain and Cafiera still lead Insieme.