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Shashi Kiran

Senior Director, Market Management

Data Center, Cloud and Open Networking

Shashi Kiran is the Senior Director and worldwide Market Manager for Data Center, Cloud Networking and SDN at Cisco. In this role, he oversees the global market market management for products and solutions across Cisco's multi-billion dollar data center and cloud networking portfolio.

He and his team have been responsible for the marketing aspects of SDN solutions including Cisco's Application Centric Infrastructure (ACI), Cisco's Open Network Environment (ONE) strategy as well as bringing Cisco's Intercloud Fabric to market with overall responsibilities for messaging, positioning, audience centric value proposition and competitive posture. Shashi and his team also work closely with Cisco sales and channel partners to scale their marketing and business efforts globally.

Previously, Shashi led the marketing effort for Cisco's $13B+ Data Center Networking, Virtualization and Enterprise Switching portfolio, which included Cisco's Catalyst, Nexus and MDS product families. He also had responsibility in other areas, including aspects of Security, WAN optimization, Application load balancing etc.

Shashi has also led Enterprise Routing product and solutions marketing at Cisco, which included the ISR and ASR families. He also was involved in Cisco's SmartGrid strategy at a conceptual stage.

In his nearly two decade career, Shashi has held leadership roles in the areas of Product Line Management, Marketing and Sales engineering focusing on Security, Routing, Metro Ethernet, Energy Efficiency and hi-touch services for Enterprise, Service Provider and Public Sector initiatives. Prior to Cisco he worked with Nortel, venture funded start-up Euclid Inc. and the Centre for Development of Advanced Computing (Dept. of IT, Govt. of India). He was also an editorial consultant and columnist for the Network Magazine (Indian edn.) from 1997-2001 in a honorary capacity.

Shashi has also contributed to standards bodies, primarily in security, and frequently speaks at industry events on a diverse range of technology areas.

He holds a Bachelors degree in Electronics Engineering and a Masters in Business Adminstration, in addition to executive leadership programs at Harvard and Standford Universities. He is also an active CISSP certification holder.

Follow Shashi Kiran on Twitter @ www.twitter.com/netkiran.

Articles

September 10, 2015

CLOUD

CliQr and Cisco ACI take an “Application First” approach to Hybrid Clouds

2 min read

In the application economy, it is all about time to application delivery and focus on optimizing the entire application lifecycle. With the sustained “cloudification” of IT, supporting multiple applications while reducing cost and complexity in a multi-cloud environment becomes very critical.  Most companies suffer from application sprawl with scripting, complex workflows and a cumbersome ticket-based approach defining […]

August 27, 2015

DATA CENTER

Hosting Provider Zitcom Accelerates Time to Market with Cisco ACI

1 min read

Recently I had an opportunity to sit down with Thomas Raabo, Network Operations Manager of Zitcom, a premier partner-driven hosting company based out of Denmark. Thomas and his team address companies and applications of various sizes, and were one of the early adopters of Cisco’s Application Centric Infrastructure (ACI). At the time of my conversation, they […]

August 11, 2015

DATA CENTER

Micro-segmentation: Enhancing Security and Operational Simplicity with Cisco ACI

5 min read

(This blog has been developed in association with Praveen Jain, VP, Engineering of Cisco’s Application Policy Infrastructure Controller, Juan Lage, Principal Engineer and others) Security is top of mind in today’s data center and cloud deployments and security architectures have continued to evolve even as new threats manifest themselves in the digital world. Today’s security […]

August 4, 2015

CLOUD

Pulsant Accelerates Business Transformation with Cloud solutions from Cisco and F5

2 min read

Data Centers and Clouds are all about applications. The efficacy of a data center or cloud deployment is a function of how quickly applications can be stood up, scaled or de-commissioned as required. As new architectures continue to evolve, data center and cloud architects are constantly on the lookout for innovative ways to further simplify […]

March 11, 2015

CLOUD

Ready, Set…Cloud! Vblock, VxBlock and Cisco ACI usher in operational simplicity and software defined innovation fo …

4 min read

Complexity is easy. Simplicity is hard. Solving operational complexity has been one of the hardest challenges in data center and cloud build-outs. For customers, the challenge of interfacing with different...

January 6, 2015

DATA CENTER

New Data Center Webcast – Cisco ACI and Nexus 9000 Production Customers Discuss Game Changing Business Outcomes; E …

2 min read

Business requirements define Applications. Applications run on IT infrastructure. If the IT infrastructure is more responsive to the needs of applications, then, it almost certainly guarantees better business outcomes. That is the premise of Cisco’s next Data Center webcast to be broadcast on January 13th at 9 AM PST/ 12 EST – Is your Data Center […]

December 8, 2014

DATA CENTER

Early Stage Nexus 9K and ACI customers Step up to Share their Stories

1 min read

It is but just a year since Cisco announced its acquisition of Insieme Networks and the Application Centric Infrastructure (ACI) approach for Data Center SDN deployments. The promise was to...

October 6, 2014

DATA CENTER

Next-Gen ACI ready VCE Vblock Systems Accelerate Journey to SDN and Cloud

2 min read

  It is nearly five years since Cisco, EMC and VMware came together to set up VCE and introduce one of the world’s best integrated infrastructure solutions with the Vblocks. The promise was to deliver “dramatic efficiencies” to customers promising significant reduction in capital and operating expenses giving customers flexibility and choice. Customers appreciated the operational […]

September 19, 2014

DATA CENTER

Leading the SDN transition with ACI – One Customer At a Time

2 min read

The last several months have been a roll with several customers, channel partner and technology partner engagements. With the ACI starter kits and lab bundles shipping, customers can bring...