Cisco expands its board of directors with Salesforce.com CEO Marc Benioff and Kristina Johnson
Networking equipment giant Cisco this morning announced that Marc Benioff, co-founder and chief executive officer of enterprise cloud computing company Salesforce.com, has joined its board of directors.
Context & Ripple Effects
The appointment lands mid-pivot for both companies. Cisco spent April 2012 laying out its software-defined networking response internally — an outlined SDN plan plus a $100 million investment in the Insieme startup — as it tries to defend its switching franchise from software-driven rivals. Salesforce.com, meanwhile, has been buying its way into broader marketing clouds, confirming the $689 million Buddy Media acquisition in June 2012.
Benioff brings the cloud-software vantage point Cisco's board lacks: he has been building a pure SaaS business since 1999, was named the San Francisco Business Times' 2009 Executive of the Year, and now sits across the table from the vendor whose equipment underpins his data centers. Kristina Johnson's addition alongside him rounds out the expansion confirmed the same morning.
First-order effects
- Cisco's board gains direct insight into how its largest enterprise-software customers think about infrastructure purchasing, timed against its own SDN and Insieme push.
- Benioff now holds a formal seat inside a major networking vendor while running a company that competes for the same enterprise IT budget — an unusual dual vantage point for both firms' strategy discussions.
Second-order effects
- Closer board-level ties make deeper Cisco–Salesforce product alignment more plausible — joint cloud, collaboration, or data-center offerings that neither would build alone.
- Rivals reading the move — HP, Juniper, and the SDN startups circling Cisco's core — will treat it as confirmation that Cisco intends to compete on software and services, not just boxes, forcing them to sharpen their own cloud narratives.
Third-order effects
- If hardware vendors keep pulling SaaS executives onto their boards, corporate governance becomes one more surface where networking and cloud computing converge — the line between 'equipment company' and 'software company' blurring at the top before it blurs in the product line.
- For enterprise buyers, the pattern points toward infrastructure sold as part of integrated cloud stacks rather than standalone gear, shifting procurement decisions toward ecosystem fit over spec sheets.
The trend: Enterprise IT's hardware-and-software divide is closing from the boardroom down, as networking incumbents recruit cloud-native leaders to steer their transition beyond selling boxes.