Category:Former Cisco Employees
Two members of this category arrived inside Cisco Systems because Cisco bought the company they were already running: Eric Yuan came in with WebEx in 2007, and Gary Steele came in with Splunk in 2024. Both left again. That is the pattern this membership records. It is not a roster of long-serving networking engineers but a short list of executives who passed through the company on the way to running something that competes with it, plus the directors and acquisition founders the inherited category also collects.
Out of Cisco and into a competitor
Eric Yuan joined WebEx as one of its early engineers in 1997, rose to vice president of engineering, stayed on to run WebEx engineering after Cisco acquired the company for about $3.2 billion in 2007, and left in 2011 to found Zoom Video Communications, which competes directly with the product he had been building. Jayshree Ullal held senior positions at Cisco and AMD before joining Arista Networks in 2008 and taking it from a startup to a public company selling switches into the same data centres.
Douglas Merritt served as a senior vice president at Cisco, where he ran business units in enterprise collaboration and software, before becoming president and chief executive of Splunk. Gary Steele led Splunk through its acquisition by Cisco, served as president of Cisco's Go-to-Market organisation afterwards, and then left to run the defence technology company Shield AI. Splunk therefore appears twice in this roster, once as a destination and once as an acquisition.
The current chairman, the board and an acquisition founder
Chuck Robbins is the exception to the title. He grew up in Grayson, Georgia, took a mathematics degree at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, spent close to two decades inside Cisco, and succeeded John Chambers as chief executive in July 2015; he serves as chairman and chief executive and has not left.
The inherited category also holds people whose connection is the boardroom rather than the payroll, and the distinction matters when reading the roster. Wes Bush joined the Cisco board in May 2019 while chairman of Northrop Grumman. Carol Bartz served on the board after running Autodesk and Yahoo!, Jerry Yang served and later retired from it, and Lisa Su served on it while running AMD. David Cheriton belongs to a third category again: the Stanford computer scientist co-founded Granite Systems with Andy Bechtolsheim and sold it to Cisco in 1996, which made him wealthy but did not make him a Cisco employee.
See also
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