Richard Piasentin

Richard Piasentin is the Vice President of the Provider Connectivity Assurance (formerly Accedian Skylight, acquired September 2023) unit at Cisco. In this role, he has overall responsibility for the Provider Connectivity Assurance functions inside of Cisco. Richard is passionate about technology in general, but service assurance in particular, due to its ability to remove the barriers to innovation and to be a competitive differentiator for both communications service providers and large-scale enterprises whose owned IT and network assets are critical to shareholder value. Prior to Cisco, Richard worked as COO/CSO and CMO at Accedian, leading Accedian’s entire service assurance portfolio and transforming how customers assured their networks and differentiated their services. He was instrumental in driving the evolution of Accedian into an automated, cloud-native assurance platform with the most granular, end-to-end visibility available on the market that allowed their customers to continuously optimize end-user experience and get the most out of their network investments. Richard began his career at Nortel Networks in 1992 as a test engineer for their public carrier switching division. From there, he segued into focusing on the wireless industry, taking on a variety of senior roles at Nortel within sales, operations, and supply chain during his 17 years at the company. After Nortel, he was Vice President and General Manager for BlackBerry’s North American business, and General Manager of Viavi’s Visibility, Intelligence and Analytics (VIA) business unit. He holds a Bachelor of Science degree in electrical engineering, RF specialization, from Queen’s University in Kingston, Ontario. In his spare time, Richard enjoys gaming (every color in his hand-built rig’s RGB is a KPI!), martial arts, hiking, and mountain biking.