Cisco Finds Another New VP of Collaboration

Global leader in networking, Cisco, has appointed a new senior vice president and general manager of its collaboration division, which has now had three different heads in less than 12 months. Former Symantec executive Rowan Trollope is stepping into the shoes of former Tandberg executive O.J. Winge. Winge took control of the group earlier in 2012 from Barry O'Sullivan. According to Marthin De Beer, senior vice president of Cisco's video and collaboration group, Winge is leaving due to "personal reasons."

During his spell at Symantec, Trollope was group president of the Symantec.cloud business unit. His role was to oversee product development and sales, strategy and marketing teams. He was also in charge of the enterprise, consumer and small and mid-sized business sectors.

"Rowan brings to Cisco an excellent track record in the software-as-a-service (SaaS) market; vital experience of end-user product development expertise, and a proven background in security and category leadership," De Beer commented in his blog. "Rowan expanded Symantec's cloud-based offerings to encompass the majority of its enterprise technology portfolio-he gets the value of 'as-a-service' delivery. He's also taken new ideas from inception to business viability in a variety of domains ranging from creating the marketing campaign 'Cybercrime Is Real' to developing an SMB market-facing business unit."

At Cisco, Trollope will take on responsibility for the company's collaboration portfolio, including WebEx, Unified Communications Manager and Telepresence. He will also manage collaboration devices, software, infrastructure and services, conferencing, mobility, unified communications, customer contact centers, and desktop virtualization technologies.

"The network is transforming how we work. It is enabling us to collaborate more socially; to communicate more visually; to work on-the-move, with any device, and to leverage the Cloud to securely take our collaboration experiences with us. This is a dynamic market, with multiple simultaneous transitions occurring, and our customers are highly focused on evolving their IT and business models to adapt to the new norms of the workplace," De Beer commented.

Cisco's collaboration enterprise has been struggling with issues in execution and a slump in sales. In Cisco's third quarter, TelePresence was hit by a decrease in public and enterprise spending. In the fourth quarter there was an eight percent decline in Cisco's collaboration business. Cisco's CEO John Chambers attributed the slump to a decrease in spending on telepresence in the European market and the public sector. Cisco continues to increase its collaboration portfolio with cloud-based version of many of its software and video tools. (CU) Link