Cisco India faces exodus of top management

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Enterprise networking major Cisco India has lost four senior executives in the recent past, according to media reports.

Globally, Cisco Systems had 73,104 (+3 percent) employees in Q1 2016 against 70,951 in Q1 2015. The 3 percent increase in employee base was driven by acquisitions and investments in security, cloud and software strategic growth areas.

Lalit S Chowdhary, director – Systems Engineering for Service Provider; Jaswant Boyat, technical director heading Systems Engineering for Service Provider; Purushottam Kaushik, managing director of Sales for India & SAARC; and Joydeep Bose, managing director, Cisco Investments in Asia Pacific Japan are the key resources who left Cisco recently, Hindu Business Line reports.

Lalit Chowdhary, director – Systems Engineering for Service Provider, India and SAARC, based in Gurugram, resigned after five years in Cisco. Lalit Chowdhary was responsible for providing technology leadership across architectures and business verticals, drive revenue growth and high architecture adoption in the Indian market.

Rupinder Singh, director Sales Business Development – IoT, Public Safety and Security, Education & Healthcare at Cisco, will be replacing Lalit Chowdhary.

Jaswant Boyat, technical director heading Systems Engineering for Service Provider, India & SAARC, has resigned from Cisco to join the company rival Huawei Technologies as director — IP Network Solution Sales, effective August 1, 2016.

Jaswant Boyat’s focus areas of at Cisco were IP – Next Generation Networks, Mobility, Cloud, Video and Collaboration for service providers.

Purushottam Kaushik, managing director of Sales for India & SAARC, left Cisco in July. Purushottam Kaushik, who completed seven years at Cisco, has 24 years of experience with stints at Alcatel Lucent, Nortel Networks and Lucent Technologies.

At Cisco India, Purushottam Kaushik was responsible for creating and managing $2-billion business opportunity from country transformation projects including smart cities, e-governance, citizen services, mobility, public safety, IoT, etc.

Joydeep Bose, managing director of Cisco Investments in Asia Pacific Japan, resigned last month to become a VC. Under his leadership, Cisco invested in a total of 25 Indian start-ups, some of which are registered abroad, over the last 10 years.

Cisco will be announcing the financial results for the second quarter today.

Cisco revenue dips in Q1

Cisco’s corporate revenue declined 1.1 percent to $12 billion in Q1 2016, while Cisco Services revenue grew 11.2 percent to $3.1 billion. Cisco Services contributes 26 percent of Cisco revenues, improving 280 basis points from Q1 2015, driven by success in security and technical support services and focus on increasing renewal-based contracts.

Services deferred revenue also grew 6.8 percent to $9.9 billion in Q1 2016, driven by a focused shift to software and subscription services.

Elitsa Bakalova, senior analyst at TBR, expects services revenue growth to continue to outpace Cisco Systems revenue growth, which is projected to be in the range of 0 to 3 percent.

Cisco Services gross margin was 65.9 percent in Q1 2016, improving 250 basis points from the year-ago quarter. TBR expects Cisco to expand its portfolio to adapt to the shifting demand from clients for transformational security, IoT and cloud-based services.