A CTO Needs to Combine Tech Expertise with Business Models
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| Image: Mallikarjun Katakol for Forbes India |
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| Padmasree Warrior, Chief Technology Officer of Cisco | |
Cisco Chairman John Chambers spent nearly a year persuading Warrior to move to Cisco from Motorola, a company where she had spent most of her career. Warrior has a key role to play in Cisco’s transformation from a switches and router company to a leading platform provider for the next generation Internet. A CTO’s role, she says, is more than just looking for cutting edge products. The CTO today also needs to come up with new business models to monetise that technology. IIT-Delhi alumnus Warrior was in Bangalore recently where she spoke to Forbes India about the company’s strategy of taking the network as the platform and how it is well poised to bring together the two big trends in technology — the mobile and the Internet. Edited excerpts:
Given how quickly technology changes, how do you stay abreast of everything inside Cisco?
My role is very broad; my job is not to know the details of everything but to ask the right questions. Like do we have a lighthouse customer for SCC [the Smart Connected Communities initiative], what is our security offering in that space, making sure the architecture is connected so we are not duplicating things. It is important to have a peripheral vision and talk to people I don’t normally talk to and that’s where I use Twitter mostly. For example, I asked my 1.2 million followers on Twitter what the next generation of Internet will look like. So you can think of it like crowd sourcing for what is relevant to me. I have a very small team, I have 30-40 engineers worldwide. My role is to work with existing teams with the development organisations.
You don’t oversee the army of engineers?
Not in a direct way. Engineers in the Cisco structure are inside the product development organisation, I influence them because I am the CTO. In Motorola I had direct responsibility for engineering as well. It was more operational and internally focussed; my role at Cisco is much more strategic and much more external. It gives me the bandwidth to spend time outside which is very important now as the markets are transitioning. It gives me the freedom to work and drive changes in business models. Previously I was running engineering, I could do things but I couldn’t influence business decisions. Sometimes a technology company can struggle because they can’t get innovation into a market or into a product. I sort of bridge that gap.
Technology is changing business models. How do you cope with that?
A CTO today needs to be able to combine technology expertise with business models. Take cloud computing. While the architecture is important, the consumption models are very different. Which means how we sell what we sell is going to be very different. Twenty-five years ago when I started working, people that led technology were science officers and chief engineers. In the last five-six years, I have seen the transition. It’s not enough that you understand technology; you have to be good at thinking about the applications of the technology. You have to think about business models — not just your own but also your customers.
On an average I spend 60 percent of my time outside the company talking to CTOs and CIOs at customer organisations and visiting different markets. Being physically there and understanding the dynamics is extremely important. Internally, I partner very closely with services organisations and sales organisation, so that when they are thinking about business model changes, I can add value from a technology side.
You spent most of your working career at Motorola. What attracted you to Cisco?
(Laughs) I think John Chambers really worked at it. It took me a year to say yes. I wanted to be part of a company that can change the future in a fundamental way. How do you create the next generation Internet? How will computing architecture change? What is the role of network in that? That is so fundamental.
If you look at the last 10 years, there were two things in technology that changed our lives, the mobile and the Internet. I see Cisco as a company that can really bring the two together. That was a big attraction for me. The second is that Cisco is a very global company and we think of globalisation in a very different way. Many companies think of globalisation as outsourcing for low-cost talent or low-cost services. Whereas Cisco thinks of globalisation as a market opportunity as well as new ways of innovation.
In the past, mobile and Internet were independent industries but they are beginning to merge now. Cisco is really strong in the Internet. What does it need to do to take advantage of this confluence of the two worlds?
You need to start thinking of it as mobility, rather than mobile. Mobility is just not about the device but how can we enable applications to be available on a mobile platform. Here Cisco is positioned well because you need the network to enable mobility. For example, Webex is a conferencing solution that we developed that is usually done with a laptop and desktop with fixed Internet. We recently launched an application where you can connect into a Webex session by an iPhone, so wherever you are, you can continue to be in a videoconference on a mobile device.
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