Salesforce Poaches Cisco's Collaboration Guru

Written by Steven Walling / August 24, 2009 4:10 PM / 4 Comments

Doug Dennerline spent ten years at Cisco and was most recently Senior Vice President and General Manager of the Collaboration Software Group, making him the man in charge of WebEx and other popular offerings. He was also the one spearheading a rumored move by Cisco to make an online competitor to Microsoft Office and other Web-based collaboration suites.

But today Dennerline is departing the company for CRM- and platform-as-a-service company Salesforce, where he's becoming its head of enterprise sales in the Americas. Before heading up the SaaS wing at Cisco, he was a senior VP at the commercial and enterprise sales groups.

Dennerline will become the Salesforce executive vice president of enterprise sales in the Americas, meaning that he'll be moving further away from the kind of product strategy work he did as VP at Cisco's Collaboration Group.

Salesforce recently posted a 20% increase in revenue for its second quarter, bumping it up to $316.1 million. But in the long term, the company is still facing some competition from both Microsoft and Oracle in the CRM space despite its current dominance. It has also moved into different territory with its Force.com cloud platform for both applications and sites. For both areas, bringing in a leader in sales from Cisco who really groks cloud computing and collaborative software is a serious win for Salesforce.

As for the "why" of the matter for Dennerline, there's been no comment so far from either Salesforce or Cisco. Whether it was just a case of better opportunities and compensation or something more cultural, it's unclear at the moment. What is clear is that Cisco is losing a real veteran in a rapidly evolving and lucrative space.

Image credit: Cisco

Comments

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Wow that is a shale-up for Cisco. I'm sure they will be able to find a bright new star to fill his shoes. With all of the wonderful talent that is struggling to make the payments or have lost their jobs their will be plenty of opportunity for Cisco to pick up new blood.

Posted by: Brian Fanslau | August 24, 2009 5:10 PM

From strategy back to sales? That will be hard.

Posted by: Engago team | August 25, 2009 1:02 AM

Key for both Cisco and for Salesforce is to supplement
their collaboration tech tools with the knowledge of c
ollaborative, human behavior that leverages the use of the tools.

You can get a bunch of people in the same room or the the same "virtual" room via Webex or Telepresence and still conduct death by meeting.

If Cisco adopts the collaborative behaviors internally,
provides the metrics to measure the improved productivity and morale then it would have a powerful global position as THE place to go to get
the most efficient way to optimize an organization's performance -
providing
the knowledge/training on collaborative work
+
the tools to enable people to collaborate - any time any where.

Posted by: kare Anderson | August 25, 2009 4:49 PM