Tom Edsall

Tom Edsall serves as Senior Vice President and Chief Technology Officer for the Data Center Networking Group at Cisco Systems. Tom and his team are focused on driving the intent lifecycle – a continuous process through which Cisco’s products learn from, adapt to, and protect the needs of the applications and the demands of the business. With the industry-leading portfolio of networking solutions, Cisco is helping its customers build next generation data centers that deliver agility, performance, scale, and security with open ecosystems.

As the former SVP and General Manager of the Insieme Business Unit, Tom led the team developing a full, integrated portfolio, with a foundation of the Nexus 9000 line of switches with CloudScale Technology, automation with choice in SDN solutions including industry leading Cisco ACI, and Cisco Tetration – offering zero trust security and full visibility into all data center activity.

Tom was a co-founder and CTO of Insieme Networks, acquired by Cisco in November 2013. Prior to Insieme Networks, Tom held various roles including Cisco Fellow in the Server and Access Virtualization Business Unit, Senior Vice President and CTO of the Data Center, Switching and Services Group at Cisco. He also served as General Manager of the Cisco Data Center Business Unit responsible for the MDS and Nexus 7000 product lines, and served as CTO and co-founder of Andiamo Systems, another Cisco spin-in.

Prior to Andiamo, Tom served as Vice President of Engineering at Cisco and was one of the system architects responsible for the Cisco Catalyst 5000 and 6000 product lines. Tom was a co-founder and a member of the senior engineering management team at Crescendo Communications, Cisco's first acquisition.

Tom holds a bachelor’s and master’s degrees in electrical engineering from Stanford University, where he enjoys guest lecturing from time to time. Tom is passionate about network innovations and holds more than 100 patents.