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Mike Rau

Former Vice President and Chief Technology Officer

No Longer with Cisco

Michael Rau is the Vice President, CTO for the Borderless Network Architecture. In this role, Mike is responsible for working with customers, partners, and internally at Cisco to shape the future direction of the network and how it delivers business value to customers and partners. Mike has been with Cisco for 14 years and has been in this role since August of 2009.

Prior to this, Mike was the Vice President of WW Enterprise Technical Sales Strategy. In this position, Mike was responsible for developing technical and competitive sales strategies in support of Cisco’s Enterprise go to market. In this role, Mike worked to identify technical and competitive trends and then worked cross functionally to develop and execute on strategic initiatives. Part of his responsibility was to help develop the One Cisco approach around the creation and delivery of Borderless Network, Collaboration, and Virtualization Architectures.

In the past Mike has served as the Vice President of US Enterprise, Commercial and Federal Technical Operations. In this position, Mike was responsible for a team of 1200 System Engineers and Managers who provided pre-sales engineering support to both partners and customers. Mr. Rau has held a variety of other positions at Cisco. Starting as a Systems Engineer in the MD/DC/VA area, he supported Cisco’s entrance into the switching market. This experience led him to take on worldwide responsibilities for Competitive Marketing in the LAN Switching market. From there, Mr. Rau entered engineering management as a first line SE Manager in the Mid-Atlantic Enterprise market. After 2 years, he moved to a second line role in Federal Systems Engineering. This led to his promotion to SE Director for Federal Systems Engineering.

From his work in the Federal Government Market, Mike moved back into a corporate role responsible for running the Enterprise Technology Leadership Program (TLP). The TLP was responsible for coordinating product and solutions requirements between customers, sales, and the development organization.

Prior to Cisco, Mike worked in a variety of Information Technology roles for the Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve in Washington, DC. He is a graduate of the University of Maryland. He lives with his wife and twin sons in Leesburg, VA.