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Rob Salvagno

Vice President

Corporate Development and Cisco Investments

In his role as VP of Corporate Development and Cisco Investments, Rob Salvagno is responsible for leading all M&A and venture capital investments for Cisco. He manages Cisco’s strategic venture capital which invests hundreds of millions of dollars annually in the start-up ecosystem, helping anticipate the next set of market transitions, align with disruptive technologies, gain visibility into key geographies, and partner for innovative solutions.

Since joining Cisco in 2001, Rob has challenged the traditional model of corporate development, implementing a holistic strategy to accentuate Cisco’s technology portfolio, instead of individual deals. He led the execution of the $1.2 billion acquisition of cloud networking leader Meraki, one of the most successful platform acquisitions in Cisco’s history, and the $3.7 billion acquisition of AppDynamics, cementing Cisco’s place in the business intelligence, analytics and IT operations market. Most recently, Rob engineered the $2.3 billion acquisition of Duo, the leading provider of unified access security and multi-factor authentication delivered through the cloud.

To optimize external innovation as a mechanism for Cisco’s growth, Rob pioneered the creation of Cisco Investments, one of the most active and entrepreneurial-focused models for corporate venture capital in the industry. He co-architected the spin-ins of Nuova Systems and Insieme, spurring Cisco’s growth in data center and software-defined networking, and led the formation of alpha projects to accelerate cross-company innovation. He also helped develop and accelerate new opportunities in China through the creation of several joint venture projects in the region.

Outside of Cisco, Rob serves as a board observer for Cohesity, an industry-leading enterprise storage company specializing in platforms for hyperconverged secondary storage solutions. Prior to Cisco, Rob was a technology investment banker at U.S. investment bank Donaldson, Lufkin & Jenrette.

Rob earned a bachelor’s degree in economics from Stanford University.

Articles

December 7, 2017

EXECUTIVE PLATFORM

Cisco Announces Intent to Acquire Cmpute.io

12/21/17 Update: Pleased to announce that we have completed the acquisition of Cmpute.io. Welcome to Cisco! More and more businesses are moving workloads to private and public clouds — and often to multiple public cloud providers — in order to gain more flexibility and agility. However,…

October 23, 2017

EXECUTIVE PLATFORM

Cisco Announces Definitive Agreement to Acquire BroadSoft

Cisco is committed to delivering the next generation of collaboration experiences to all workers across every room, desk, pocket and application. These experiences include meetings, as well as messaging, calling capabilities and contact center touchpoints. As our customers continue to transition to…

October 19, 2017

EXECUTIVE PLATFORM

Cisco Announces Intent to Acquire Perspica

11/1/2017 Update: Pleased to share that the acquisition of Perspica is complete! Earlier this year, Cisco announced the acquisition of AppDynamics – uniquely positioning Cisco to enable enterprises to accelerate their digital transformations by actively monitoring, analyzing and optimizing complex…

August 21, 2017

EXECUTIVE PLATFORM

Cisco Announces Intent to Acquire Springpath – Now Complete

UPDATE — September 22, 2017:  I am pleased to announce we have completed the acquisition of Springpath, Inc. today. A hearty welcome to the Springpath team members! Our customers and partners in the data center space are frequently asking for solutions that can help them simplify management operati…

July 13, 2017

EXECUTIVE PLATFORM

Cisco Announces Intent to Acquire Observable Networks, Inc.

UPDATE — July 31, 2017:  I am pleased to announce we have completed the acquisition of Observable Networks today. A hearty welcome to the Observable Networks team members! The ability to dramatically improve visibility, security and response capabilities across an entire IT surface, including…

May 11, 2017

EXECUTIVE PLATFORM

Transforming Collaboration Through Artificial Intelligence with Cisco’s Acquisition of MindMeld

Artificial Intelligence represents a tremendous opportunity to expand the reach and enhance the capabilities of enterprise technology. At Cisco, we have already been introducing AI into our solutions across security, orchestration, application performance and collaboration. Today, I’m excited to sha…

Cisco Expands Analytics Footprint with New Talent and Technology Acquisition

Today, Cisco is announcing its intent to acquire the Advanced Analytics team and associated advanced analytics intellectual property developed by Saggezza, a privately-held technology services company. As applications are moving to the cloud and billions of things are connecting to the network, our…

Empowering Customers at the Edge

Over the past several years, an immense transition has taken place as networks have become more diverse and complex. Companies large and small have many branch sites – users at the edge that need to connect securely and quickly to the network and the cloud. Software-defined wide area networking (SD-…

January 24, 2017

EXECUTIVE PLATFORM

Cisco Announces Intent to Acquire AppDynamics

Digitization and the transition to cloud are forcing the worlds of IT and business to blend together. In the digital economy, applications are critical. Combining real-time visibility and intelligence at the network, security and application layers is transformational for companies. It can provide t…