Avatar

Rob Salvagno

Vice President

Corporate Development and Cisco Investments

In his role as VP of Corporate Development and Cisco Investments, Rob Salvagno is responsible for leading all M&A and venture capital investments for Cisco. He manages Cisco’s strategic venture capital which invests hundreds of millions of dollars annually in the start-up ecosystem, helping anticipate the next set of market transitions, align with disruptive technologies, gain visibility into key geographies, and partner for innovative solutions.

Since joining Cisco in 2001, Rob has challenged the traditional model of corporate development, implementing a holistic strategy to accentuate Cisco’s technology portfolio, instead of individual deals. He led the execution of the $1.2 billion acquisition of cloud networking leader Meraki, one of the most successful platform acquisitions in Cisco’s history, and the $3.7 billion acquisition of AppDynamics, cementing Cisco’s place in the business intelligence, analytics and IT operations market. Most recently, Rob engineered the $2.3 billion acquisition of Duo, the leading provider of unified access security and multi-factor authentication delivered through the cloud.

To optimize external innovation as a mechanism for Cisco’s growth, Rob pioneered the creation of Cisco Investments, one of the most active and entrepreneurial-focused models for corporate venture capital in the industry. He co-architected the spin-ins of Nuova Systems and Insieme, spurring Cisco’s growth in data center and software-defined networking, and led the formation of alpha projects to accelerate cross-company innovation. He also helped develop and accelerate new opportunities in China through the creation of several joint venture projects in the region.

Outside of Cisco, Rob serves as a board observer for Cohesity, an industry-leading enterprise storage company specializing in platforms for hyperconverged secondary storage solutions. Prior to Cisco, Rob was a technology investment banker at U.S. investment bank Donaldson, Lufkin & Jenrette.

Rob earned a bachelor’s degree in economics from Stanford University.

Articles

December 7, 2017

EXECUTIVE PLATFORM

Cisco Announces Intent to Acquire Cmpute.io

1 min read

To help our customers optimize the consumption of cloud resources in and control cloud spending, Cisco is announcing our intent to acquire Cmpute.io, also known as 47Line Technologies.

October 23, 2017

EXECUTIVE PLATFORM

Cisco Announces Definitive Agreement to Acquire BroadSoft

3 min read

Cisco is committed to delivering the next generation of collaboration experiences to all workers across every room, desk, pocket and application. These experiences include meetings, as well as messaging, calling capabilities and contact center touchpoints. As our customers continue to transition to the cloud, they are demanding deployment flexibility across all of these experiences. This […]

October 19, 2017

EXECUTIVE PLATFORM

Cisco Announces Intent to Acquire Perspica

2 min read

11/1/2017 Update: Pleased to share that the acquisition of Perspica is complete! Earlier this year, Cisco announced the acquisition of AppDynamics – uniquely positioning Cisco to enable enterprises to accelerate their digital transformations by actively monitoring, analyzing and optimizing complex application environments at scale. Today, we are excited to announce the intent to acquire Perspica, […]

August 21, 2017

EXECUTIVE PLATFORM

Cisco Announces Intent to Acquire Springpath – Now Complete

1 min read

Our collaboration with Springpath led to Cisco’s HyperFlex product, the industry’s first fully integrated hyperconverged infrastructure system. We are excited to now welcome Springpath to the Cisco team.

July 13, 2017

EXECUTIVE PLATFORM

Cisco Announces Intent to Acquire Observable Networks, Inc.

1 min read

Together, Cisco and Observable Networks will extend our Stealthwatch solution into the cloud with highly scalable behavior analytics and comprehensive visibility.

May 11, 2017

EXECUTIVE PLATFORM

Transforming Collaboration Through Artificial Intelligence with Cisco’s Acquisition of MindMeld

1 min read

The acquisition of MindMeld, Cisco’s third in two weeks, represents how our innovation strategy continues to impact our strategic shift to become more of a software company.

Cisco Expands Analytics Footprint with New Talent and Technology Acquisition

1 min read

Today, Cisco is announcing its intent to acquire the Advanced Analytics team and associated advanced analytics intellectual property developed by Saggezza, a privately-held technology services company. As applications are moving to the cloud and billions of things are connecting to the network, our customers need a way to see and manage these increasingly complex networks. […]

Empowering Customers at the Edge

1 min read

Over the past several years, an immense transition has taken place as networks have become more diverse and complex. Companies large and small have many branch sites – users at the edge that need to connect securely and quickly to the network and the cloud. Software-defined wide area networking (SD-WAN) technologies are enabling customers to […]

January 24, 2017

EXECUTIVE PLATFORM

Cisco Announces Intent to Acquire AppDynamics

1 min read

Together with Cisco's Digital Network Architecture, customers will now have end-to-end insight across their technology stack.

October 17, 2016

EXECUTIVE PLATFORM

Cisco Announces Acquisition of Worklife

1 min read

I’m pleased to announce the acquisition of Heroik Labs, Inc. doing business as Worklife. Worklife is a privately-held company based in San Francisco, CA that provides software to improve meeting productivity. Worklife’s mission is to help teams be prepared and informed so they can run highly effective meetings. Their application enables people to be more […]

September 28, 2016

INNOVATION

Innovation, Transformation and Impact Through Investments and M&A – 2016 and Beyond

3 min read

One year ago, I became the new leader for Cisco’s Corporate Development team, leading Cisco’s acquisitions and investment strategy. The corporate development team was already firing on all cylinders, and this last year proved just how impactful we could be.  The past 12 months became one of the most active years in Cisco’s history, with […]

August 30, 2016

EXECUTIVE PLATFORM

Cisco Announces Intent to Acquire ContainerX

1 min read

I’m excited to share that today Cisco announced its intent to acquire ContainerX, Inc., Cisco’s first acquisition in the rapidly emerging container market. ContainerX is an early stage, privately held company focused on building technology to help enterprises manage, orchestrate and integrate containers across data centers. Many of our customers are starting to use containers […]

June 28, 2016

EXECUTIVE PLATFORM

Cisco to Expand Cloud Security Portfolio with Acquisition of CloudLock

1 min read

I’m excited to share that today Cisco announced its intent to acquire CloudLock Inc., a leading cloud security solution that gives companies visibility and policy control over content shared in cloud applications. CloudLock specializes in Cloud Access Security Broker, or CASB, technology and helps organizations move faster to the cloud. CloudLock delivers cloud security to […]

April 15, 2016

EXECUTIVE PLATFORM

Cisco Completes Acquisition of CliQr

1 min read

I’m excited to announce that we’ve completed our acquisition of CliQr Technologies Inc., a privately-held company that provides a cloud platform to model, deploy and manage applications across hybrid IT environments made-up of data centers, private and public clouds. CliQr’s technology is very complementary with our data center strategy. CliQr will extend Cisco’s Application Centric […]

March 8, 2016

EXECUTIVE PLATFORM

Cisco Announces Acquisition of Synata

1 min read

Today, I’m excited to announce the acquisition of Synata. Synata is a privately-held company based in San Francisco that will enhance how customers can search rooms and content within Cisco Spark, our business collaboration service. Cisco Spark is built on the Cisco Collaboration cloud and enables customers to message, meet, or call anyone, anywhere, and […]

March 2, 2016

EXECUTIVE PLATFORM

Cisco Announces Intent to Acquire Leaba Semiconductor

1 min read

Today, I am pleased to announce Cisco’s intent to acquire Leaba Semiconductor, a venture-backed fabless semiconductor company based in Israel. Leaba is a team with a strong and successful track record of designing leading edge networking semiconductors that provide innovative solutions to address significant infrastructure challenges. This acquisition advances our innovation strategy, supports continued differentiation […]

February 3, 2016

EXECUTIVE PLATFORM

Cisco’s Intent to Acquire Jasper is All About Making IoT Simple, Scalable and Interoperable

2 min read

Today, Cisco announced its intent to acquire Jasper, a company that delivers a cloud-based IoT service platform for millions of connected devices. With Jasper, enterprises can simplify and automate the management of IoT services across a wide range of connected products such as cars, printers, vending machines and many others.   I’m incredibly excited about […]

November 20, 2015

EXECUTIVE PLATFORM

Cisco Announces Intent to Acquire Acano

2 min read

We are at an inflection point in video adoption. In the enterprise alone, less than 10 percent of the conference rooms in the world are connected via video and only 1 percent of users have video systems on their desktop today. The market is poised for dramatic growth, with IP video expected to represent 80 […]