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Karen Walker

Senior Vice President and Chief Marketing Officer

Karen Walker is the Senior Vice President and Chief Marketing Officer at Cisco, overseeing Global Marketing. Walker and her team are responsible for building and strengthening Cisco's brand, supporting growth strategies, cultivating opportunities in new and existing markets, and increasing demand for Cisco's solutions globally.

Since joining Cisco, Walker has championed marketing's role as an accountable business function, aligning closely with sales teams, engineering teams, and Cisco partners. Karen has made strategic investments to further Marketing's vision to become the leader in real-time, personalized marketing. Most notably, she has invested in the newest marketing technologies to build a multi-award-winning techstack (Markie 2017 and 2018, Stackie 2017, and more), creating a world-class digital marketing infrastructure optimizing for the best experience for our customers, sellers, and partners. Walker has also led as Cisco's brand value increased 16% to $34.6B dollars, ranking #15 on Interbrand's Best Global Brands list.

Leading up to her promotion to CMO, Walker excelled in her various roles at Cisco, starting as the Global VP of Services Marketing, growing to take on Segments and Partners, and then finally becoming SVP of Go-to-market.

Walker's 20-plus years in the IT industry have included senior field and marketing leadership roles in Europe, North America, and the Asia Pacific region. She joined Cisco from Hewlett-Packard, where she held business and consumer leadership positions including VP Marketing for HP Services, Executive Director of Consumer Digital Entertainment and VP Personal Systems groups.

Walker is a recognized industry authority on both technology and marketing topics, frequently participating on panels and giving keynotes around the world. For three years in a row she has been recognized by Forbes as one of the world's Most Influential CMOs, currently ranked in the Top 10 globally. She is a member of the Board of the Association of National Advertisers and is a strong supporter of the #SeeHer movement – an effort led by the ANA to accurately portray women and girls in the media by 2020. Walker also sponsors multiple initiatives to accelerate female leadership within Cisco and has lectured on business thought leadership at multiple universities.

Walker holds a Bachelor of Science degree with joint Honors in Chemistry and Business Studies from Loughborough University in England and was awarded an Honorary Doctorate of Business Administration from the University of Sunderland in 2018.

Articles

November 13, 2018

12

EXECUTIVE PLATFORM

The bridge between hope and possibility

Cisco was founded on the possibilities of a single connection between two people. Over thirty years later, that one connection has multiplied to billions, two founders have grown to 75,000 employees, and the world is filled with an unprecedented complexity and opportunity. What remains unchanged is…

June 28, 2018

EXECUTIVE PLATFORM

Creating Connections at Cannes

Last week I attended the Cannes Lions International Festival of Creativity, joining the world’s leading brands, marketers, media platforms, and creative minds for a week of great discussion. It was so inspiring to see the incredible work being done, with a huge focus on innovation, technology, distr…

June 10, 2018

2

EXECUTIVE PLATFORM

Empowering Women One Course at a Time

Cisco has a long history of using technology to connect the world and change lives for the better. Our brand is all about the connections that make anything possible—and it continues to come to life in new and exciting ways. The stories are many: Together with Dimension Data, we were able to reduce…

May 22, 2018

7

EXECUTIVE PLATFORM

Introducing Cisco Webex: The More Intuitive Way to Work

Last month at the Cisco Collaboration Summit in Phoenix we announced the relaunch of Cisco Webex, showcasing innovative capabilities that make virtual meetings more natural and make working together easier than ever before. And today we begin sharing the story with the world by kicking off a new mar…

May 9, 2018

EXECUTIVE PLATFORM

Putting (Brand) Safety First

At Cisco, we pride ourselves on our strong, clear and inclusive brand values. It’s the reason we have one of the most loyal customer communities. And it’s why the value of our brand continues to rise on the Interbrand Top 100 Global Brands list, this year hitting almost $32B in value and #16 in the…

May 8, 2018

17

EXECUTIVE PLATFORM

Expanding Connected Conservation in 2018

Co-Authored by Doc Watson, Group Executive: Cisco Alliance, Dimension Data and Karen Walker, Senior Vice President and Chief Marketing Officer, Cisco For 27 years, Dimension Data and Cisco have been partners in delivering on a greater good for the world. In 2015, with a shared passion for protecting…

March 6, 2018

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EXECUTIVE PLATFORM

GDPR: It’s Getting Personal

With the deadline to the enforcement of the EU GDPR (General Data Protection Regulation) fast approaching (May 25), I have been spending more time with Cisco’s Marketing Privacy team making sure we are ready. As a company, our customers’ privacy is of the utmost important to us and we want to…

February 22, 2018

EXECUTIVE PLATFORM

Joining the (Olympic) Movement to #SeeHer in the Media

If you live in the US and have been watching any of the Winter Olympics coverage on NBC, you may have seen the amazing ads celebrating the women taking part in the games. Many of the spots are sponsored by companies such as P&G, AT&T, USAA, Verizon, and NBC Universal and they are broadcast m…

February 16, 2018

1

EXECUTIVE PLATFORM

Establishing Normalcy to Do the Extraordinary

Since its genesis, Cisco has sought to apply our technology and resources to positively impact people around the world, working closely with our partners and customers to do so. Whether it’s reskilling people through the Network Academy, saving Rhinos from poachers in South Africa, or providing conn…