Charles Carmel, Cisco's main M&A man, leaves for Warburg Pincus

Charles Carmel, the executive who became known for driving Cisco's (Nasdaq: CSCO) mergers and acquisition strategy, has decided to return to his investment banking roots by joining private equity firm Warburg Pincus.

Charles Carmel, Cisco

Charles Carmel is departing Cisco to join Warburg Pincus, a private equity firm. (Screencap: Cisco Systems)

What's significant about Carmel's departure is that it comes at a time when Cisco is conducting a major restructuring of the company by laying off 15 percent of its workforce and shutting down unprofitable units such as its Flip camera business.

During his 10-year tenure at Cisco, Carmel led over 30 acquisitions, including, most notably, the $6.9 billion deal for Scientific Atlanta and the $2.9 billion acquisition of online video conferencing company WebEx for $2.9 billion in 2007.

Having served as an investment banker at Goldman Sachs Group's technology investment banking group, Carmel is hardly a stranger to the private equity business.

Taking Carmel's place as VP of corporate development is Hilton Romanski, who most recently served on Cisco's Service Provider Business leadership team following a 10 year stint on Cisco's Corporate Development team.

While Cisco's near-term focus will remain squarely on restructuring the company to regain market share it lost from aggressive rivals including Alcatel-Lucent and Juniper, the vendor is not ruling out acquisitions of key assets as seen by its absorption of Comptel's AXIOSS software assets this week.

For more:
- Reuters has this article

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