Exodus @ Cisco India sees four top executives depart in 6 weeks

Fiscal year 2016 (up to July 31) did not end well for Cisco India, with the company witnessing the exit of four senior executives.

The company’s Director – Systems Engineering for Service Provider, India and SAARC, Lalit S Chowdhary who was based in Gurugram, quit after five years in Cisco. He was responsible for providing technology leadership across architectures and business verticals, drive revenue growth and high architecture adoption in the market.

According to sources, familiar with his move, Chowdhary who has nearly three decades of experience and has logged stints with Alcatel Lucent, Lucent Technologies and Hughes Software Systems, is moving out to don a new hat as an entrepreneur.

His role has now been taken over by Rupinder Singh, who was Director Sales Business Development – IoT, Public Safety and Security, Education & Healthcare.

Another Gurugram-based executive, Jaswant Boyat, Technical Director heading Systems Engineering for Service Provider, India & SAARC, also quit in July to join Cisco’s competitor, Huawei Technologies as Director — IP Network Solution Sales, effective August 1, 2016. With over 20 years of experience and stints in Ericsson, Lucent Technologies, Virtual Networks and Euclid Inc, Boyat’s key areas of focus at Cisco were IP – Next Generation Networks, Mobility, Cloud, Video & Collaboration for Service Providers.

Cisco’s Managing Director of Sales for India & SAARC, Purushottam Kaushik, who according to sources, was in discussions with the management since May on his next move within the company, quit in July.

Kaushik who completed 7 years and four months at Cisco in March and has 24 years of experience with stints at Alcatel Lucent, Nortel Networks and Lucent Technologies; was responsible for creating and managing a $2-billion business opportunity which Cisco is looking to address over the next few years from country transformation projects including smart cities, e-governance, citizen services, mobility, public safety, IoT, etc. On being contacted Kaushik without revealing his next move, said: “I was in discussions internally since May which did not work out, therefore, I decided to quit to pursue my own aspirations.”

On why Cisco is unable to retain top talent, he said: “On the contrary, Cisco has invested a lot in the top 15 leaders over the last two years, including myself. I was assigned a personal mentor who is an industry stalwart for the last two years and was given the opex to take care of the development of key members in my team.”

Joydeep Bose, Managing Director, Cisco Investments in Asia Pacific Japan, also quit last month to become a VC. Under his leadership, Cisco invested in a total of 25 Indian start-ups, some of which are registered abroad, over the last 10 years.

The latest is in Kolkata-based, video surveillance/analytics firm, Videonetics. Cisco declined to comment on the four exits, stating it was in the quiet period.

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