Maria Martinez

Maria Martinez is Executive Vice President and Chief Customer Experience Officer at Cisco. As a member of the executive leadership team, Martinez oversees Cisco's $13B Services and Customer Success organizations that are responsible for helping customers transform their businesses through Cisco's broad portfolio of software, subscription and services offerings. Under her leadership, Martinez is also helping to drive Cisco's overall sales and go-to-market transformation to deliver greater business outcomes for customers as they transform their businesses.

Martinez brings more than 35 years of leadership experience from a variety of technology sectors including software, services, networking technology and hardware to Cisco. Most recently, she served as President, Customer Success Group and Success Cloud, as well as General Manager for Latin America at Salesforce. In these roles, she was responsible for keeping Salesforce's 100,000-plus customers across the globe happy, including the on-boarding, product usage, best practices, training, customer support, professional services, partner certification, and developing long-term relationships, while also looking after the firm's operations in the emerging Latin America region. Prior to joining Salesforce, Martinez managed Microsoft's global services business, including professional services and customer support for all products. During her six-year tenure, she led the business to outperform revenue targets and to significantly increase Microsoft's customer satisfaction rating. Martinez has held a number of other leadership positions at Motorola and AT&T. She also served as the CEO of Embrace Networks where she led the development of the start-up's technical strategy, launched its first software platform and developed its customer base.

Martinez serves on the Board of Directors for McKesson and the Silicon Valley Education Foundation. She has received several distinctions for her leadership, most recently being ranked No. 2 on the ALPFA (Association of Latino Professionals For America) list of the 50 Most Powerful Latinas. Martinez holds a bachelor's degree in electrical engineering from the University of Puerto Rico, and a master's degree in computer engineering from Ohio State University.