Padmasree: Yes the role of a Chief Technology Officer is very different from any of the other CXO roles. If you think of a COO or a CMO or a CFO, those kinds of roles tend to be very uniform across the industry and across different companies. Whereas the role of a Chief Technology Officer I would say is very dynamic. It changes depending on the company’s needs; it changes depending on the individual themselves and the skills that they bring to the role and it is a lot influenced by the time and the period of evolution of the technology. So in my own career I have been in a CTO kind of a role for the last probably 15 years or so, and I would say everyone in those roles is very different. Sometimes you are a chief engineer, sometimes you are an evangelist preaching the new disruption and fostering new ideas in the company, and sometimes you are working on improving R&D efficiency and it is all of the above. My role at Cisco is very much focused, I would say, on technology strategy and understanding our customer needs, and what the future needs are going to be for our customers. So I spend a lot of my time talking to customers, figuring out what some of the problems are, that they feel they are going to face as an entity, and trying to influence our product roadmaps to address those concerns. I also spend a lot of my time looking at our growth opportunities and helping my peers within the company, and move those priorities to where they are operationalized. So it is very much focused around future, growth, looking at new opportunities and building the right products to serve our customers.
Kamla: So strategy- it seems when like when you are working on the strategy for Cisco you seem to be outbound focused.
Padmasree:Yes my role I would say is very much externally-focused. I serve as a key spokesperson for the company with respect to technology and areas of disruption. I also spend a lot of time with industry analysts and customers as I said ,trying to figure out their future needs. I do spend quite a lot of my time internally though trying to bring together our technical communities to address the roadmap needs. But I would say a large part of it is externally focused.
Kamla: I just have to ask you, you have mentioned the word disruptive technologies more than once. So it looks like that’s a major focus of what you are doing.
Padmasree: Yes absolutely. I think probably the common thread that any CTO for any company, if you look across the different segments, would have, is to look at what is changing and what will change the industry as we know it today. So obviously a clear focus of my role is to understand what some new opportunities are going to be ,for us to move in to market adjacencies and catch market transitions as they occur, but also look at what could change the IT landscaping in the future and how might Cisco catch that transition.
Kamla: That naturally leads us to the next question. You know the economic downturn. How is Cisco going to come out of the downturn in terms of the market place and the opportunities that you have and in terms of disruptive technologies. What is it that Cisco is focused on now and for the next 24 months?
Padmasree: You know it’s interesting you should ask that. If you look at Cisco’s history as a company, Cisco has typically demonstrated that we actually do really well during a downturn and I think it’s because this company, we see when there is an economic downturn, when theres industry consolidation happening, we see that as an opportunity for us to invest in new areas; rather than stay the course or maintain the status quo. So it’s a perfect opportunity for us, the way we look at it, to think about what we can do with the technology that we have, that allows us to invest in new opportunities, acquire perhaps some companies that we would want to build up our portfolio etc. So we are very much focused on catching those market transitions and investing in growth opportunities to set us up for the future. With respect to that as a company, we have identified 26 growth opportunities or priorities. Some of them are large market transitions, some of them are new product categories. And one of the things that we are focused on during this downturn is to try to prioritize our resource allocation across these 26 priorities, so that we are prepared to drive the economy when it does come back out of this cycle we are currently in.
Kamla: Could you list some of those top priorities?