Cisco revamps engineering unit, veteran Ahuja to leave company

Cisco is reorganizing its engineering division into four new teams to match areas the company sees as most critical, marking the latest move CEO Chuck Robbins has taken in his short tenure to rework the vendor's structure.

Under the new structure, the engineering division will consist of Networking, Cloud Services & Platforms, Security, and Applications & IoT. Each of the unit leaders will report directly to Robbins.

As part of this latest reorganization effort, Kelly Ahuja, an 18-year Cisco veteran who oversaw the vendor's service provider business, is leaving the company.

Taking over Ahuja's role is Yvette Kanouff, who will serve in an expanded Service Provider organization. Kanouff will report to head of engineering Pankar Patel.

David Goeckeler will continue to lead Cisco's Security business, and will now report directly to Robbins. Likewise, Rowan Trollope will continue to lead IoT & Applications and will now report directly to the company CEO. Robbins said that he views IoT as one of Cisco's biggest and most promising new markets.

Finally, Zorawar Singh, who is new to the company, will lead the newly formed Cloud Services & Platforms organization, while Liz Centoni will be promoted to SVP and will lead the Computing Systems Product Group.

This is just one of several reorganization efforts Cisco has undergone in recent years. In 2014, the vendor reorganized its routing and switching business into two larger teams, software and hardware. 

A key focus of Robbins' reorganization efforts has been to rework the service provider division. The vendor sold its Scientific Atlanta set-top box unit for $600 million to Technicolor in July 2015.

For more:
- Network World has this article
- Business Insider article

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