Eric Knipp

Eric Knipp is the Vice President of Solutions Engineering for the Global Specialists organization at Cisco. In this role he leads the Global Specialists engineering community and leads the alignment and interlock between Global Specialists and Cisco’s Business Entity leaders, X-Architecture efforts, and Cisco’s Global Competitive team. Previously, Eric served as the 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 satisfaction. Eric also partnered with Cisco’s Engineering and Customer Experience (CX) organizations to bring innovative solutions and offers to market. Before that role, he served as the Senior Systems Engineering Director for the Americas Service Provider Segment. Throughout his 20-year tenure with Cisco, Eric has held numerous positions focused on engineering and architectural development. He is passionate about evolving the networking industry and his team 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.