Cisco Hires Former Sun VP as Its First Cloud CTO

SAN FRANCISCO-Cisco Systems, which is swiftly moving into the cloud computing infrastructure business and which will announce new cloud computing services at next week's Cisco Live conference in Las Vegas, has named former Sun Microsystems cloud guru Lew Tucker as its first cloud computing CTO.

Tucker told eWEEK about his appointment June 24 at the GigaOm Structure conference here at the UCSF Mission Bay Conference center.

Tucker will report to Cisco CTO Padmasree Warrior and to Tony Bates, who is senior vice president and general manager of Cisco's Service Provider Group.

The appointment of Tucker, an accomplished IT architect, technician and administrator, is a clear sign to competitors such as Hewlett-Packard and IBM that Cisco is serious about getting deep into the cloud-building and provisioning wars.

Tucker, who will interface directly with system architects and software developers, told eWEEK that "we definitely need to make the network more programmable and intelligent, and we will develop the ecosystem to do that."

Tucker started his new job the week of June 21 and said he has his first set of meetings on Monday, June 28.

Cisco has seen its business evolve quickly in the last several years-from establishing itself the world's No. 1 switch-and-router-producing Internet pipe fitter to becoming a major data center infrastructure player in direct competition with such long-established players as IBM, Oracle/Sun and Hewlett-Packard.

The company introduced its Unified Computing System server architecture in March 2009 and has since added key peripheral businesses such as WebEx, TelePresence and even the Flip video camera to scale out its offerings.