Gary Steele

Gary Steele is Cisco’s EVP and GM of Splunk, overseeing more than 7,000 Splunkers who partner with enterprises worldwide to drive digital resilience with its industry-leading security and observability solutions. A highly regarded technology executive and cybersecurity expert with over 30 years of experience, he has a proven track record of successfully scaling SaaS operations and growing multi-billion dollar global enterprises. Gary served as Splunk’s CEO for two years prior to joining forces with Cisco. Under Gary’s leadership, Splunk delivered a dramatic transformation, driving durable growth with increasing profitability. In two years, Gary led the company to grow total revenues by 58% to $4.216 billion and ARR by 35% to $4.208 billion (from FY22 to FY24). During the same time period, Splunk's adjusted free cash flow generation grew 8.6x to more than $1 billion, and the company also achieved a full fiscal year of GAAP profitability in its final year as an independent company. Splunk also significantly accelerated product innovation under Gary’s leadership, delivering best-in-class and market-leading capabilities across its unified security and observability portfolio, as well as new AI-powered products through Splunk AI. Today, the team is relentlessly focused on strengthening and broadening its product portfolio, and helping Cisco’s global customers on their journey toward resilience across their entire digital footprint. In 2023, Gary became a co-chair of Aspen Digital’s U.S. Cybersecurity Group, a leading cross-sector, public-private forum that accelerates the pace of cybersecurity preparedness and response to ultimately drive greater cyber resilience around the world. Prior to joining Splunk, Gary was the founding CEO of Proofpoint, where he led the company’s growth from an early-stage start-up to a leading, publicly traded security-as-a-service provider. He previously served as CEO of Portera and held various leadership roles at Sybase, Sun Microsystems and Hewlett-Packard. Gary is an avid supporter of the arts community. Since 2021, Gary has served on the Board of the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art and is a Co-Chair of the Collectors' Forum. Gary has also served as a member of the board of directors of Upwork, a talent freelancing platform, since 2018. He holds a B.S. from Washington State University.