Manjula Talreja is Vice President of Global Cloud Business Development for Cisco. As part of the leadership team of Cisco’s Global and Strategic Partner Organization, she is responsible for accelerating cloud services revenue using transformational partnership models between Service Providers (SPs), System Integrators (SIs), technology companies and channel partners.
A hallmark of Manjula’s career has been the application of her business acumen and expertise in innovation and transformational business models. Her leadership has helped guide Cisco business teams through many inflection points, including the transitions from IT to e-business and networking point-products to network-based business transformation solutions, and building industry partnerships for the then nascent Cloud market.
Manjula is a 25-year IT industry veteran with extensive experience in general management, business strategy consulting and operations of large scale IT systems. She has spent the majority of her career at Cisco, which she joined in early 1993 and where for the first seven years, she played a pivotal role in transforming the IT organization to an e-business leader.
From 2004-2007, Manjula served as Senior Director of Customer Business Transformation with Cisco’s Voice Technology Group (VTG). During this time, Cisco expanded its networking footprint into new collaborative technologies such as IP Telephony (IPT), Unified Communications (UC) and video conferencing, generating a $1B run-rate in UC and acquiring WebEx. Manjula then went on to serve as VP of Strategy and Operations for the parent organization of VTG, the Software Group (SWG.)
Manjula ran and launched the Virtual Computing Environment (VCE) coalition, a partnership between Cisco, EMC and VMware created to accelerate customers’ abilities to increase business agility with data center virtualization and private cloud. During her leadership, the VblockTM Infrastructure Platforms – the jointly developed VCE solution – helped propel VCE to $10 million in business in just four months, along with a pipeline of $100 million in deals.
Prior to Cisco, Manjula spent five years with Hewlett Packard (HP) in their IT manufacturing organization, where she worked on Global Manufacturing Systems in the US, South East Asia and Europe.
Manjula’s is a highly sought-after industry thought-leader, where she has spoken globally at such venues as IDC’s Cloud Leadership Forum, VoiceCon (now called Enterprise Connect) and EMC World. She is also a respected speaker within Cisco where she regularly presents at customer Executive Briefing sessions, Cisco Live, and C-Scape for analysts. Manjula also frequently advises start-ups and small businesses on e-commerce, supply chain and e-business strategies, both through formal board seats and other consulting engagements.
Manjula received her bachelor’s degrees in Economics and Information Systems from the University of Delhi; she also holds a bachelor’s degree in Business with a major in Information Systems from Santa Clara University.
