Cisco CTO: We needed better accountability

Network World - Cisco's massive user show, Cisco Live, is going on this week in Las Vegas. Padmasree Warrior, Cisco's senior vice president of engineering and CTO met with Cisco Subnet editor and blogger Julie Bort. They discussed Cisco's progress since Warrior took the helm as CTO, the reorganization of Cisco's engineering groups, Catalyst vs. Nexus, the so-called Cisco "tax" (its prices vs. the competition), network virtualization, Cisco's toe dipping into the brave new world of open source and the future careers of the Cisco CCIE faithful. What follows is an edited transcript of the interview.

BACKGROUND: A Cisco engineer says changes at Cisco are good

What are two or three concrete successes that Cisco has had since you took the CTO helm?

One was coming up with a strategy for cloud when the industry was still discussing what "cloud" means. We started articulating at Cisco the notion about private clouds, drove the partnership with VMware and EMC, created this whole notion of converged infrastructure. We started on this journey about three years ago, saying it is network, compute, storage coming together, working with VMware and EMC on the Vblock and obviously lots of people from all three companies developing that. Second thing, I would say is really shifting the company more towards an architectural focus, from being just a pure product company.

What does an architectural focus mean?

If you look at data center, nobody really buys specific products anymore. They look at a data center architecture that includes different products and how they are put together. It's not just a switch for the data center, but how applications fit and how does a management stack work on that. In collaboration especially. Cisco had started off as a company that provided different video and voice applications separately. We are now bringing together those sets of products to be more connected and work together.

Tell me a little bit more about the reorganization that John Chambers touched upon in his keynote today. What is your role and how you think it is going to affect customers?

We're putting the teams together. That's a change we made recently. We used to have three separate groups. We had a voice group, a communications group, a team doing Quad which was separate from the team doing Webex. We've brought all that together under a single leadership. It's painful - not popular decisions internally. We've exited things like e-mail and focused on where we need to go.

When I joined Cisco, there was a council of nine people leading engineering. About three years ago or so, we went to a council of five and now the council is no longer there. Engineering is led by two of us, myself and Pankaj Patel [Senior Vice President, General Manager of the Service Provider Group]. We truly co-lead the engineering group. It's not two in a box. We have a team that focuses on all core switching and routing.