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Liz Centoni
Liz Centoni on LinkedIn 
Follow @Liz Centoni is Executive Vice President and Chief Customer Experience Officer at Cisco. In this role, she leads a 20,000 strong team helping customers transform their businesses in the AI era through Cisco’s full portfolio of AI-enhanced software, subscription, and lifecycle services. Liz is passionate about applying technology to customer success and adoption across the entire portfolio. Under her leadership, Cisco is focused on delivering personalized, proactive and predictive experiences using automation, AI and data to help customers get the most out of their technology investments.
Liz recently served as Executive Vice President, Chief Strategy Officer, and GM of Applications at Cisco. As Chief Strategy Officer, she helped to drive the multi-national technology corporation’s overall strategic direction, and spearheaded the $28bn acquisition of Splunk, positioning Cisco at the forefront of the AI revolution by leveraging unprecedented data advantages. Liz also served as a voting member of Cisco’s Investment review board which directs the company’s efforts with startups and the global venture community. As General Manager of Applications, Liz led the business strategy and development for the SaaS portfolio that powers optimized experiences for customers’ applications. She also helped design, develop and launch Outshift by Cisco, a team incubating emerging technologies to create new markets and businesses.
Other Cisco roles include Senior Vice President and General Manager of Cisco‘s Cloud, Compute, and IoT business where Liz was instrumental in developing, executing, and evangelizing Cisco‘s IoT portfolio strategy, driving it to profitable growth and leading digital transformation initiatives. In every role, Liz has been relentlessly focused on getting it right for the customer.
Liz uses her platform as a renowned leader to champion diversity, inclusion in STEM, and ethical AI around the world. She is an active mentor and sponsor and serves as Cisco’s Global Executive Sponsor for the Women in Science and Engineering (WISE) program.
Liz serves on the Board of Directors for Mercedes Benz and Workday. She holds a B.S. in Chemistry from the University of Mumbai and an M.B.A. from the University of San Francisco.
As Chief Strategy Officer, Liz Centoni partners with the Executive Leadership team to drive the company's overall strategic direction. As the General Manager of Applications, Liz is responsible for the business strategy and development efforts for the SaaS portfolio that powers optimized experiences for customers' applications, which are increasingly central to their businesses in today's digital, cloud-first world. She also leads a team incubating emerging technologies to create new markets and businesses for Cisco. Liz is a voting member of Cisco's Investment review board which directs the company's efforts with startups and the global venture community.
Liz is an accomplished business leader with deep technology experience and has transformed large-scale and highly complex businesses. She is recognized for developing and executing strategies, growing multi-billion-dollar global businesses and teams.
Prior to this role, Liz was Senior Vice President and General Manager of Cisco's Cloud, Compute, and IoT business, where she drove the business and engineering strategy for this global portfolio. Liz was instrumental in developing, executing, and evangelizing Cisco's IoT portfolio strategy in Industrial IoT, Edge Intelligence and SaaS-based cellular connectivity platform for devices ranging from Connected Cars to Smart meters, driving it to profitable growth and leading Digital Transformation initiatives. In Cloud and Computing Systems, Liz led the team to define and execute the strategy enabling our customers' operating model needs in Hybrid Cloud. This included building the SaaS hybrid cloud platform, expanding into adjacent markets such as Hyperconverged and leading the industry in cloud-managed solutions for the compute market.
She also led the Service Provider Access Group as Vice President and General Manager, responsible for strategy, marketing direction, and engineering efforts to grow Cisco's Carrier Ethernet Access solutions portfolio.
She has held multiple engineering roles leading global teams building software and central engineering services, executing engineering plans with feature velocity, quality and focus on getting it right for the customer.
Mentorship, talent development and leadership are important priorities for Liz, and she is an active mentor and sponsor of underrepresented groups. She is the Cisco Global Executive Sponsor for the Women in Science and Engineering (WISE) program.
Liz serves on the Board of Directors for Mercedes-Benz AG. She holds a Bachelor of Science in Chemistry from the University of Mumbai and an M.B.A. from the University of San Francisco.