Karen Walker is Senior Vice President of Segment, Services & Partner Marketing at Cisco. She leads a global team that engages customers to understand their technology challenges and addresses them with high-value Cisco product and services solutions. Her Partner Marketing team supports both customer and partner-led models, with the goal of strengthening and growing profitable relationships with strategic partners. Previously, Walker served as Vice President of the Services Portfolio for Cisco Services, where she helped bring to market a set of services that delivered faster time-to-revenue for customers and partners and high levels of customer satisfaction.

Walker has held many management roles during her 27 years in the IT industry. She joined Cisco from Hewlett- Packard, where she was Vice President of Alliances and Marketing for HP Services and Vice President of Strategy and Operations for both the Consumer Digital Entertainment and Personal Systems Group. She also spent 15 years in field leadership for HP Services running businesses in Europe, North America, and Southeast Asia.

Walker is a recognized industry authority on both technology and marketing topics. She is a Board member of the I.T. Services Marketing Association and a member of the CMO Council, and she has lectured on business thought leadership at UC Berkeley, Haas Business School.

Walker holds a bachelor of science degree with joint honors in chemistry and business studies from Loughborough University in England.