Eric Knipp is Senior Vice President and General Manager of Cisco's Customer Experience (CX) Americas division, managing the most extensive region for CX, generating more than $8.9 billion in yearly revenue. His leadership encompasses 17 countries across 6 sectors, including the U.S. Public Sector, Global Enterprise Segment, U.S. Service Provider, U.S. Commercial, Canada, and Latin America. The organization comprises professional and support services, architecture, delivery, and customer success teams who, in collaboration with partners, provide business solutions across the customer lifecycle, enhancing the speed of achieving value and returns from their technology investments. Previously, Eric served as Vice President of Solutions Engineering for Cisco’s Global Specialists organization where he led the Engineering community as well as the alignment and interlock between Global Specialists and Cisco’s Business Entity leaders, X-Architecture efforts, and Global Competitive team. Before that role, Eric was Vice President of Systems Engineering in the Americas—the largest systems engineering team within Cisco—working closely with Sales leadership to develop Cisco’s technology go-to-market and ensure customer and partner satisfaction. In that role, he also partnered with Cisco’s Customer Experience (CX) organization to bring innovative solutions and offers to market. Throughout his 21-year tenure with Cisco, Eric has held numerous positions focused on engineering and architectural development. Beyond his core mission, he is passionate about evolving the networking industry and his Cisco teams through innovation by unlocking the value of programmability and integrating the network into the modern application development and DevOps frameworks. Before joining Cisco, Eric held several industry roles with companies such as AT&T and Nortel, where he focused on providing advanced architectural guidance to senior IT leadership in the areas of network architecture, global telephony design, and security. Eric earned a Master of Business Administration degree from Indiana University and holds a Cisco Certified Internetworking Expert (CCIE) certification. He has served as a contributing author to multiple publications focused on network design, security, and unified communications, and has been formally recognized as a distinguished speaker at numerous events including Cisco Live. Eric resides in Raleigh, North Carolina with his family and enjoys many activities such as hunting, skiing, weightlifting, biking, and martial arts.