Karen Walker is the Vice President of Segment & Services Marketing in Cisco’s Global Marketing and Corporate Communications organization. She leads a global team responsible for: shaping Cisco’s marketing with insights from partners and customers; global demand generation; worldwide enterprise and service provider marketing; as well as marketing and communications for the Cisco Services business.

Prior to taking this position, Walker served as Vice President of Marketing and Communications for Cisco Services, an $8Bn global business constituting 22% of Cisco’s overall revenue. In this role, she was responsible for Services corporate communications and overall marketing, including portfolio marketing and management, marketing strategy, services marketing and marketing communications. During her tenure, Walker helped bring to market a world-class portfolio of services with faster time-to-revenue and high levels of customer satisfaction.

With over 27 years of information technology industry experience, Walker has held a number of senior global and field general management and marketing roles. She joined Cisco from Hewlett-Packard, where most recently she held the role of Vice President of Marketing for the Americas. In this role she was responsible for marketing a comprehensive portfolio of hardware, software, services and solutions to Small and Medium Businesses, as well as Enterprise and Service Provider customers through all routes to market.

While at HP, Walker held the roles of Vice President of Alliances and Marketing for HP Services and Vice President of Strategy and Operations for both the Consumer Digital Entertainment and Personal Systems Group. Prior to this, Walker spent fifteen years in field leadership for HP Services running businesses in Europe, North America, and Southeast Asia.

Walker is a recognized industry authority on both marketing and technology topics. She is a Board member of the I.T. Services Marketing Association (ITSMA), a member of the CMO Council and a frequent lecturer on marketing thought leadership at UC Berkeley, Haas Business School.

Walker holds a Bachelor of Science degree with joint honors in Chemistry and Business Studies from Loughborough University in England.