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 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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