As Chief Strategy Officer and GM, Applications, Liz Centoni partners with the Executive Leadership team, other General Managers, and functional leaders to drive the company’s overall strategic direction, and leads a team incubating emerging solutions to create new markets and businesses for Cisco. As the GM of Applications, Liz is responsible for Cisco’s portfolio of solutions that power optimized experiences for our customers' applications, which are increasingly central to their businesses in today’s digital, cloud-first world. 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 the strategy for Cisco’s IoT portfolio 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 a leader in Digital Transformation. In the Cloud and Computing Systems area, Liz led the team to define and execute the strategy to enable 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 portfolio of Carrier Ethernet Access solutions.
Previously she was Vice President of Engineering Strategy and Portfolio Planning and 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 an important priority 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 Daimler AG and Ingersoll Rand Inc.
Liz holds a Bachelor of Science in Chemistry from the University of Mumbai and a M.B.A. from the University of San Francisco.