Padmasree Warrior, the high-profile chief technology and strategy officer of networking giant Cisco Systems, will be leaving the company during the summer, multiple sources briefed on the move tell Re/code.
Cisco CTO Warrior to Depart Company Following Management Shake-Up
The succession battle at Cisco has prompted a bunch of departures, including Rob Lloyd and Gary Moore.
Cisco
The announcement could come within about three weeks. According to one source Warrior’s last day on the job will be July 25, the day before Chuck Robbins formally takes over as CEO and succeeds the company’s longtime CEO John Chambers. It’s not clear if she has a new job lined up, but according to sources she is planning to explore taking board seats with other companies. She’s already a director at cloud software and collaboration company Box and retailer The Gap.
She recently interviewed for at least one job, but determined the role was not a good fit. She’s also said by sources to be considering job offers both as a CEO and as a managing partner at a venture capital firm.
The move comes in the wake of a succession race that has lasted nearly three years. In landing the CEO role, Robbins vaulted over the heads of several contenders including president Rob Lloyd, who had been considered the most likely successor and who was technically Robbins’s boss.
Today Cisco announced that Lloyd and COO Gary Moore will also be leaving the company. As with Warrior, both will be leaving on July 25. All three had been considered possible contenders to succeed Chambers who first started talking about plans to leave Cisco in 2012. In a blog post, Robbins said he is about two weeks away from formally naming his leadership team.
Warrior has been CTO at Cisco since 2008 and added the title of CSO in 2012. A native of India, she earned a chemical engineering degree at New Delhi’s Indian Institute of Technology. She then moved to the U.S. and earned a Masters in the same subject at Cornell University. While studying for a PhD she accepted a job in Motorola’s Semiconductor unit and stayed on at that company for more than two decades. She spent four years as Motorola’s CTO before joining Cisco.
At Cisco she succeeded Charlie Giancarlo, a longtime Cisco executive who was once considered a possible Chambers successor in his own right. He left to run the telecom company Avaya, spending eight months as its interim CEO and is now its chairman.
A Cisco spokesperson declined to comment.
This article originally appeared on Recode.net.
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