India born Padmasree Warrior, 49, is the Chief Technology Officer of Cisco, the $36.1 billion (revenue as on March 31, 2009) networking giant.
Cisco Chairman John Chambers spent nearly a year persuading Warrior to move to Cisco from Motorola, a company where she had spent most of her career. Warrior has a key role to play in Cisco’s transformation from a switches and router company to a leading platform provider for the next generation Internet. A CTO’s role, she says, is more than just looking for cutting edge products. The CTO today also needs to come up with new business models to monetise that technology. IIT-Delhi alumnus Warrior was in Bangalore recently where she spoke to Forbes India about the company’s strategy of taking the network as the platform and how it is well poised to bring together the two big trends in technology — the mobile and the Internet. Edited excerpts:
Given how quickly technology changes, how do you stay abreast of everything inside Cisco?
My role is very broad; my job is not to know the details of everything but to ask the right questions. Like do we have a lighthouse customer for SCC [the Smart Connected Communities initiative], what is our security offering in that space, making sure the architecture is connected so we are not duplicating things. It is important to have a peripheral vision and talk to people I don’t normally talk to and that’s where I use Twitter mostly. For example, I asked my 1.2 million followers on Twitter what the next generation of Internet will look like. So you can think of it like crowd sourcing for what is relevant to me. I have a very small team, I have 30-40 engineers worldwide. My role is to work with existing teams with the development organisations.
Cisco has moved into so many different categories of products, from handheld video cameras, to smart grids, data centres and so on. How does one understand where you are headed from a technology or product perspective?
It is very simple, there is core networking and around that are four pillars — video, collaboration, data centre and virtualisation, and smart connected communities. Those four drive the network. Our whole strategy is around taking the network as the platform. For example, take video. We believe it will transform work, life, education. It will play a role in how cities and buildings get connected. Video is clearly a killer app. It also drives bandwidth which drives innovation in our core products. There is video all the way from user-generated video applications, which is what Flip does — it allows you to take a quick 2-minute recording and put that over which is a consumer device. We can bring it in the enterprise and allow all of us to do video blogging very easily. Supposing my team did a great job, I will send a message saying, thank you guys you did a great job, and I can send that as a text or email message. That is very impersonal, whereas if I tape myself and send it as a video message, all of a sudden it is much more personal. As if I am shaking their hand one by one.