President, Emerging Markets Theatre Cisco Systems

Paul Mountford is president of the Emerging Markets Theatre for Cisco Systems. Paul is responsible for developing and executing the company's go-to-market strategies to drive growth in four regions: Central and Eastern Europe, Latin America and the Caribbean, the Middle East and Africa, and Russia and the Commonwealth of Independent States.

Paul is well known for his creative solutions to business issues. In fact, as Cisco SVP of Worldwide Channels, from 2001 through 2005, he created an innovative approach to Cisco's go-to-market with its channels, evolving the company's business model to drive partner profitability for mutual success. This team effort resulted in Cisco being designated the best partner program in the IT Industry as voted by channel partners.

Prior to taking over WW Channels, Mr. Mountford played a pivotal role in the development and execution of a very successful sales and marketing strategy for EMEA (Europe, Middle East, and Africa ). His accomplishments include being the first to secure a $100-million-month outside the United States , the first to create complementary marketing and channel strategy for his region and the first to develop and implement an extensive Government Affairs Program.

Mountford joined Cisco in 1996 as managing director of the United Kingdom and Ireland where in three years he helped propel the annual revenue run rate from $160 million to $1.4 billion, catapulting this region from Cisco's fifth largest to the largest market outside the United States. In 1998 he was promoted to vice president of the UK and Ireland and was awarded EMEA Vice President of the Year.

In 1999 he was again promoted to vice president Service Provider Line of Business EMEA where he more than doubled the service provider infrastructure business. In 2000 he was promoted to Vice President of PTT1 in EMEA. The PTT1 sales team was recognized in 2000 as the top performing sales team in EMEA and in August of 2001 Mountford was awarded Vice President of the Year for the Service Provider Group.

Mountford brings over 20-years of Information Technology industry experience to Cisco. Prior to joining Cisco, Mountford owned a channel development consultancy where he helped US-based companies develop successful channel strategies for successfully entering international markets. Mountford has also held several key sales positions at Azlan, Retix, Arix Systems and Norsk Data.