Tony Bates, who directed Cisco’s core enterprise, commercial and small business division, has left the company, according to a Cisco blog entry posted on Monday.
CTO Padmasree Warrior will now lead development in that group, adding the title of senior vice president and general manager of the Enterprise, Commercial and Small Business Development Group. In her new role, she will lead a team of more than 10,000 engineers, Cisco said.
Bates, who worked at Cisco for more than 15 years, led the company’s routing group when the CRS-1 carrier core router was introduced and later headed the company’s Service Provider Technology Group. He came to Cisco from MCI, the former long-distance network company.
Most recently, Bates was senior vice president and general manager of the Enterprise, Commercial and Small Business Group, the core of Cisco’s business. In the blog post, Cisco praised Bates for his leadership in the development of the Cius, Cisco’s enterprise tablet that was introduced in June and is scheduled to go on sale early next year. Cisco said Bates is leaving the company “to pursue another opportunity.”
Bates is expected to become the new CEO of Internet voice and video provider Skype, according to a New York Times report on Monday.
Warrior, formerly CTO of Motorola, joined Cisco as CTO in 2007. She has been a key figure pushing Cisco’s data center vision, which combines the company’s Nexus switch line and Unified Computing System servers with virtualization software from VMware and storage from EMC, through the Virtual Computing Environment Coalition.