APJC CIO Roundtable
with Dave West and Jeetu Patel

Dave West

President, Cisco Asia Pacific, Japan and Greater China

Dave West is President for Cisco Asia Pacific, Japan, and Greater China (APJC). This group comprises seven organizations operating across a diverse set of markets: Australia and New Zealand, ASEAN, India and SAARC, Korea, Japan, Greater China, and Service Provider. In this role, he is responsible for developing Cisco’s strategy, accelerating business growth, and ensuring Cisco APJC is the most trusted and relevant IT solutions partner and provider in the industry.

Dave works closely with customers to understand the market transitions influencing their businesses, and within Cisco, works cross-functionally with teams to design and implement innovative go-to-market models for customers' multiyear digital transformations. He is passionate about driving a people-first culture, creating opportunities for employee growth, and building diverse, high-performing teams.  

Dave is a 21-year Cisco veteran with over 26 years of experience in the ICT industry. His most recent role was President and General Manager for Cisco Japan, where he managed all aspects of the Japanese market, and before that, he led Worldwide Sales for Enterprise Networks, with responsibility for the sales, solutions, and engineering motions to deliver innovation and transformation across Cisco’s core portfolio.

Prior to that, Dave was the Chief Technology Officer (CTO) and Architectures leader for Enterprise Networks, Data Center, Security, and Collaboration in Asia Pacific and Japan. He was responsible for capturing market transitions, delivering sustained competitive leadership, and driving growth across all technologies. He has held various leadership roles within the Worldwide Sales, Global Partner and Public Sector organizations.

Dave is a former Marine Officer, graduated from the Virginia Military Institute, and holds an MS in Information Systems from the Naval Postgraduate School.

Jeetu Patel

EVP & GM Security & Collaboration

Jeetu Patel is Cisco’s Executive Vice President and General Manager of Security and Collaboration. He leverages a diverse set of capabilities to lead the strategy and development for these businesses and also owns P&L responsibility for this multibillion-dollar portfolio. Jeetu combines a bold vision, steeped in product design and development expertise, operational rigor and innate market understanding to create high growth Software as a Service (SaaS) businesses.

A member of the Executive Leadership Team, Jeetu is helping to redefine Cisco's SaaS business and strategy to further accelerate the company's transformation and growth. His mission is to build world class, subscription-based products that solve Cisco customers’ biggest problems. His team is creating and designing meaningfully differentiated products that diverge in the way they’re conceived, built, priced, packaged and sold.

Prior to joining Cisco, Jeetu was the Chief Product Officer (CPO) and Chief Strategy Officer (CSO) at Box, a role he pioneered. He led the company’s product and platform strategy, setting the company’s long-term vision and roadmap for cloud content management in the enterprise. He transformed Box from a single product application to a multi-product platform used by 100K customers representing 69% of the Fortune 500. The discipline, quality standards, performance metrics, and stability Jeetu instilled fueled the platform’s growth – nearly quadrupling revenues to $700M+. Box’s growth scaled to reach over 60M users with over 50% of customers using multiple products. He also created the Box Platform business unit where he led product strategy, marketing and developer relations – driving products from incubation stage to mature offerings.

Before joining Box, Jeetu was General Manager and Chief Executive of EMC’s newly acquired Syncplicity business unit, a cloud service for Enterprise File Sync Sharing (EFSS) and collaboration. One of the first SaaS-based solutions offered by EMC, Jeetu spearheaded the company’s acquisition. He created a world class leadership team, secured some of the market’s largest customers and led the group to become one of the fastest growing EFSS companies in a highly competitive market. Other key roles at EMC included CMO for the Information Intelligence Group and Chief Strategy Officer, where he drove the organic and inorganic strategy for the division’s cloud and mobile growth.

Previously, Jeetu was President of Doculabs, a research and advisory firm co-owned by Forrester Research. The firm focused on collaboration and content management across a range of industries including financial services, insurance, energy, manufacturing and life sciences.

He currently serves on the boards of HackerRank, a market-leading technical assessment and remote interview solution for hiring developers and JLL, an American commercial real estate services company.

Jeetu holds a B.S. in Information Decision Sciences from the University of Illinois, Chicago and lives in the San Francisco Bay Area with his family.

William Thomas, PhD

Director, Economist Intelligence Corporate Network

William Thomas is the Director of the Economist Corporate Network in South-east Asia. An experienced advisor to senior business and government leaders, he helps organisations understand the strategic, operational, and talent implications of geopolitical changes.

William holds a PhD in public policy from George Mason University in the US, as well as a degree in economics from the University of Virginia and an MBA. His academic research has centered on managing change in large, multinational organisations, with an emphasis on organisational culture.

William is a retired United States Air Force lieutenant colonel, having spent much of his 21-year career as a strategic planner for complex operations such as humanitarian assistance and counterterrorism. He was Associate Professor of Political Science at the US Air Force Academy, and later taught at Georgetown University in Washington DC and as a Fulbright Scholar at Nanyang Technological University in Singapore.

Having worked in Asia since 2012, William has focused on leadership development and organisational change as a consultant, leadership coach, and training facilitator. 

Vish Iyer

Vice President, Architecture Sales, APJC

Passionate about technology, Vish Iyer leads Cisco’s Architectures business in Asia Pacific, Japan and China. With about three decades of experience in the fast-growing ICT sector, Vish has led teams who have accelerated the pivot to a platform and subscription-based business model along with the partner ecosystem.

Vish and his team have co-created world leading innovations with key customers to solve most complex problems in the region, including mobile transport innovations for 5G/4G mobile broadband services, affordable video platforms for 350 million connected homes in Asia, pre-integrated API driven enterprise service stack for multi-cloud adoption, smart city platforms for improving citizen experience, and industry-leading contact center solutions with extensible ethnic language support.

Vish is focused on building the next generation of leaders and collaborates with INSEAD School of Business in Singapore, where he’s a frequent speaker in the Emerging Leaders Program for South Asia and India. The joint case studies built through this program are now used extensively in Wharton and INSEAD.

Vish is passionate about grassroot innovations and is working on helping university students develop a startup mindset by setting up Southeast Asia’s Cisco ThingQbator program which is geared towards identifying commercially viable innovations with a strong social purpose. Vish takes pride in consulting, counseling, and championing dozens of young teams looking to make a mark on the world through innovative ideas and intelligent experimentation.

Prior to joining Cisco in 1998, Vish worked at HCL Comnet for five years as the regional lead for the system integration business in West/South of India.

Vish holds a Bachelor of Technology in Computer Science and Engineering from the Indian Institute of Technology, Banaras Hindu University.

Based in Singapore, Vish is passionate about family, reading, sports and gastronomy.

Puneet Singh

Director, Communications

Puneet Pal Singh is Head of Communications for Asia-Pacific, Japan and Greater China at Cisco. As a strategic communications adviser to C-suite executives, he oversees overall corporate communications, crisis management, content creation, and public and media relations campaigns.

He leads Cisco's Thought Leadership across the region and is responsible for conceptualizing and delivering data and research-driven campaigns aligned with business priorities to drive perception change and establish Cisco as an industry leader in key segments.

Puneet has more than 15 years of experience in the media and communications field. A former journalist, Puneet previously worked with BBC News as a Business Reporter and with ESPN Star Sports as a TV Host.