Shashi Kiran

Shashi Kiran is the Senior Director and worldwide Market Manager for Data Center, Cloud Networking and SDN at Cisco. In this role, he oversees the global market market management for products and solutions across Cisco's multi-billion dollar data center and cloud networking portfolio.

He and his team have been responsible for the marketing aspects of SDN solutions including Cisco's Application Centric Infrastructure (ACI), Cisco's Open Network Environment (ONE) strategy as well as bringing Cisco's Intercloud Fabric to market with overall responsibilities for messaging, positioning, audience centric value proposition and competitive posture. Shashi and his team also work closely with Cisco sales and channel partners to scale their marketing and business efforts globally.

Previously, Shashi led the marketing effort for Cisco's $13B+ Data Center Networking, Virtualization and Enterprise Switching portfolio, which included Cisco's Catalyst, Nexus and MDS product families. He also had responsibility in other areas, including aspects of Security, WAN optimization, Application load balancing etc.

Shashi has also led Enterprise Routing product and solutions marketing at Cisco, which included the ISR and ASR families. He also was involved in Cisco's SmartGrid strategy at a conceptual stage.

In his nearly two decade career, Shashi has held leadership roles in the areas of Product Line Management, Marketing and Sales engineering focusing on Security, Routing, Metro Ethernet, Energy Efficiency and hi-touch services for Enterprise, Service Provider and Public Sector initiatives. Prior to Cisco he worked with Nortel, venture funded start-up Euclid Inc. and the Centre for Development of Advanced Computing (Dept. of IT, Govt. of India). He was also an editorial consultant and columnist for the Network Magazine (Indian edn.) from 1997-2001 in a honorary capacity.

Shashi has also contributed to standards bodies, primarily in security, and frequently speaks at industry events on a diverse range of technology areas.

He holds a Bachelors degree in Electronics Engineering and a Masters in Business Adminstration, in addition to executive leadership programs at Harvard and Standford Universities. He is also an active CISSP certification holder.

Follow Shashi Kiran on Twitter @ www.twitter.com/netkiran.