Cisco’s new UK and Ireland CEO Scot Gardner speaks to Computer Weekly about the supplier’s role in driving Britain’s industrial and digital strategies, supporting startups and skills, and the impact of Brexit
At Cisco Live, which took place in Berlin in February 2017, the networking business offered its usual insights into the future of the digital business, pushing its customers towards the software-centric, mobile-driven world that it is helping to create and launching a swathe of new products to support them.
Faced with the erosion of its traditional focus on supplying the network boxes that power global businesses, Cisco has discovered it has a key role to play in the digitisation of the enterprise; as more businesses transition down this route, intense pressure is brought to bear on the network.
But digitisation is much more than just improving business processes. It challenges society just as much – if not more so – than it challenges the c-suite. This is something that is not lost on Cisco’s new UK and Ireland CEO, Scot Gardner who replaced the long-standing and well-regarded Phil Smith last year.
Gardner came to the role as a veteran Cisco employee, having joined in September 1997 as an account manager, he has moved around Cisco’s UK business several times, running financial services and public sector, followed by a stint in charge of service providers that took him out into EMEA, before returning to Bedfont Lakes to take over the local business.
In the seven months since taking the job, Gardner tells Computer Weekly he has been particularly focused with how Cisco operates as a core element of the British economy, and even society, something that by his own admission he had not noted before.
“When you’re in the service provider world or running a line of business, you don’t see so much of the softer side of what Cisco does in the UK, so I think it’s great to come back and get involved in some of that more directly,” he says.
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