Nightingale leaves Cisco, Davidson’s role expands

Cisco announced that Todd Nightingale, EVP and general manager of Cisco’s Enterprise Networking & Cloud business, is leaving the company to become CEO of Fastly, a content delivery network (CDN) company.

Nightingale will take on that new role effective September 1.

“At Cisco, we always want the best for our teams, our people and their continued growth in their careers,” said a Cisco spokesperson. “We are grateful for Todd’s many contributions to Cisco and congratulate him as he takes on a new opportunity as a CEO of another company in an adjacent market.”

Nightingale has been with Cisco for over 10 years.

Rather than recruiting someone new to fill Nightingale’s role, Cisco is expanding the duties of Jonathan Davidson who will now oversee both Enterprise Networking & Cloud as well as the Mass Scale Infrastructure Group. 

jonathan Davidson, Cisco
Jonathan Davidson (Cisco)

The spokesperson said, “We are excited for Cisco's Jonathan Davidson to take on an expanded role leading a new organization that combines Enterprise Networking & Cloud with the Mass-Scale Infrastructure Group. We are confident that this new team will continue to accelerate innovation for our customers and partners and drive growth for our business.”

Aside from expanding Davidson’ role, Cisco’s choice to combine two large business groups is a strategic shift.

The company said the combination will allow it to deliver one vision for end-to-end networking and bring technology solutions closer together to solve customer challenges
 
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Davidson was named SVP and general manager of Cisco's Mass-Scale Infrastructure Group in March 2020. Since then, he’s led the group that builds silicon, optics, hardware and software for Cisco’s largest network customers. As part of that, he also oversees Cisco’s 5G ambitions.

Cisco reported disappointing fiscal fourth quarter earnings in May, which it attributed to macro forces such as supply chain issues related to its hardware components.

But Futuriom analyst Scott Raynovich noted that Cisco has been saying for a number of years that it’s moving to a more software focus. So, it doesn’t make sense to blame hardware problems for its revenue shortfalls. Raynovich said, “If investors look below the surface they will find that Cisco’s problems are more structural in nature and have been going on a long time.”