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“Cisco is positioned to lead for the next several decades”
 Sometimes referred to as a “geek queen,” 47-year-old Padmasree Warrior won one of the most highly- prized geek jobs in the world recently when she was named CTO at Cisco. She comes to the networking giant from Motorola, where her departure came days after embattled CEO Ed Zander said he was stepping down. Warrior was executive vice-president and CTO of Motorola, and her arrival means that Cisco now has women in both the CTO and CIO positions. She spoke to Richard Martin, InformationWeek’s Editor-at-Large, about the next phase of the Internet’s evolution and how she plans to help lead Cisco into the new era.
It seems you’ve jumped from a sinking ship onto the deck of a passing cruise liner.
Motorola is a great company, with a talented and dedicated employee base and a lot of prowess and depth and breadth in technologies. In my most recent position there, I led a significant portion of the technology and the engineers, and I wish them all success. My primary reason for making this move at this time has more to do with where I am in my career, and where and how I want to spend the next several years of my career. Cisco is a company I’ve long admired, and I think it’s positioned to lead for the next several decades in technological evolution.
What did John Chambers say to you to make you want to take this job?
I knew John, and some of his management team, from before. John is somebody I consider a true leader in the tech industry. If you look at his track record, and what he’s done with the company, he’s grown it to a very significant, successful position. What’s characteristic about Cisco is the culture it has. It is very customer-centric.
What’s striking about John, his management team and the entire workforce is their commitment to being a technology leader. They have an almost unwavering focus on innovation. John’s vision, where he sees the company going forward in the second phase of the Internet’s evolution, is aligned with my passion and my interest in creating solutions for the next wave of opportunities in this space. I have been consistent in speaking about Web 2.0 and collaboration technologies, and the significant role they will play in the consumer and enterprise space. Our vision is very much aligned with where he is taking the company and the areas I am interested in working in.
This position has been unfilled for two years. Is that an advantage or a disadvantage for you coming in?
I believe I will be the fourth CTO Cisco has had. It has been vacant since Charlie Giancarlo moved over two years ago [to become chief development officer in 2005].
I see it as an opportunity. A role like the CTO is less about defining what your position does and delivers, and more about setting a vision for the company, and working with customers to define new technology directions and identify new business opportunities. It is a role that will work in partnership with John’s team, particularly the chief development office and the product development organization.
What do you see as the biggest challenges ahead for you and for the company?
Cisco defined the network in many ways, and has shown itself able to catch market transitions at the right time. That is a big strength of theirs, to be able to see where the market is heading. Convergence is an overused word, but this larger shift from vertical stovepipes in IT toward a much more horizontal model is the biggest change happening now. Whether it’s video, voice or data, in the future those will all be on the same platform and it will be much more horizontal.
Cisco is well-positioned in a lot of its capabilities, not only in terms of the technology we possess but also in the realm of business-model transformations and in identifying them early on. You may have the technological depth, but if you don’t know how to implement the business model changes the technology tends to sit on the shelf. Cisco has a great track record of catching the market innovations and business-model transformations. We are poised to lead the next set of innovations on the Internet, using collaboration as a solution not just for the enterprise but for the consumer space as well.
Coming from Motorola into the CTO office in a big enterprise-focused company like Cisco, how do you go about enabling that shift toward the consumer side?
I think there are several similarities between the enterprise and the consumer sides depending on the solutions you provide. If you think about the more collaborative and network-oriented solutions, the intelligence and the smarts you have to put into the network are going to be similar to enable those, whichever space you’re in.
The big difference is that the adoption of technology in the consumer space is on a much faster cycle, especially in consumer electronics. What I can bring in is time-to-market and speed of execution. Cisco has always been an entrepreneurial company, so it’s not such a difficult transition to make.
Some would say that Cisco as a networking company is simply trying to avoid becoming commoditized.
It depends on how it is executed. I’m not sure anybody knows the exact answer yet. The consumer companies are trying to get into the networking space because they’re afraid they will become commoditized. Service providers and applications providers are trying to get into hardware because they see more value in providing an end-to-end solution and they need to have a platform to deliver to. The network companies are moving into applications and solutions. I don’t think the challenge that Cisco faces is unique, it is just the dynamic where the industry is evolving.
Chambers has made some fairly strong proclamations about collaboration and telepresence being the next big market shift, transforming business models, and so on. Aren’t these really just advanced tools to allow companies to do more efficiently things they’re already doing?
The way I see it, the Internet is nothing but a tool that allows the open transfer of communications and information. But it has evolved to enable so many different things in terms of commerce, entertainment, relationships, information-sharing, and so on.
So we’ve seen that a simple tool can lead to major transformations in industry and society, and it’s not uncommon for a tool to do that. Collaboration is another tool that allows connectivity to occur quicker and in more dynamic ways, and that’s where social networking comes in. I see that as a major transition. How quickly that will happen will depend on how the phased delivery of solutions and applications plays out.
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