Sandy Thompson
Senior Director
IT Large Scale Services Architecture Connected IT Services
Sandy Thompson currently leads Cisco IT’s Large Scale Services Architecture, including the business transformation of Sales & Partner Enablement, Order Management, Supply Chain, and Cisco Services. This includes ensuring strategic alignment between Business and Technology Architectures, while focusing on business agility, enabling new business models and scaling operational excellence. She also serves as the IT Site Executive for Cisco’s RTP campus.
More recently, Sandy lead the new Technology and Capability Transformation team within Cisco’s Global Data Center Program. Responsibilities included end-to-end accountability for new Infrastructure, Data and Platform service offerings (XaaS) through first client adoption. This also included Cisco’s first deployment of a Metro Virtual Active/Active Data Center pair, showcasing Cisco’s Virtualization/Cloud Architecture. She also lead the creation of Cisco IT’s Global Data Center Strategy as Director of Data Center Services, where she held world-wide, end-to-end responsibility for Cisco’s internal data centers. Responsibilities included planning, design, implementation, operations and optimization for all production and development data centers in support of both Business and Engineering functions realizing 10-15% cost savings annually.
Sandy also formerly lead the Intelligent Network Services team globally, with responsibilities for routing, switching, wireless, IP telephony, security and remote access. In this role, she initiated new, key IT partnerships with Cisco Enterprise Product Development functions to develop a repeatable “Cisco-on-Cisco” deployment framework helping to accelerate Cisco’s market opportunities through successfully influencing and demonstrating internal use of Cisco Enterprise solutions.
Sandy joined Cisco in 1998, accepting various IT leadership roles, including: Helpdesk, Call Center, Desktop, Client Services, and IP Telephony Design and Engineering. Sandy has over 26 years of technology experience. She is a change agent and visionary leader who thrives in new market disruptive opportunities which require a strong vision, cross-functional collaboration, teamwork and execution. Her passion is enabling the business through transformational change.
Previously, she was a leader at Nortel Networks and held management positions in IT, including: Business Application Development, Business Client Engagement, Program Management, Engineering Applications, Database Administration, Data Warehousing and IT Strategic Planning. Her extensive IT Application and Infrastructure experiences provide the unique background to assimilate diverse and distributed teams into a single virtual team focused on common goals and success, especially in a rapidly changing, intelligent and competitive environment.
Sandy holds a Bachelor of Arts in Computer Science with a minor in Mathematics from East Carolina University as well as a Masters degree in Business Administration from Duke University’s Fuqua School of Business. As a marathoner, tri-athlete and Ironman, Sandy enjoys personal challenges, continuous learning and inspiring others. She strives to make an impact everyday, openly giving back her time and insight to those around her, both on and off Cisco’s global campus.
