Cisco Senior Exec Takes Top Slot at Western Digital

Data storage company Western Digital’s search for a new CEO, announced in October, has come to an end with the appointment of David Goeckeler, Cisco’s executive vice president and general manager, networking and security business. He’ll replace Stephen D. Milligan, who is retiring.

Western Digital’s David Goeckeler

Goeckeler, a 17-year Cisco veteran, was in charge of the company’s $34 billion global networking and security business and a team of more than 25,000 engineers. He was responsible for security strategy and market acceleration, including development operations for Cisco’s technology portfolio and strategic acquisitions. Cisco has named Todd Nightingale, formerly senior vice president and general manager of Cisco Meraki, as his successor, earning the new title of senior vice president and general manager, enterprise networking and cloud.

“David is a transformative leader with an exceptional track record of driving highly profitable, core businesses at scale while innovating successful business strategies that expanded into new markets and generated new revenue sources,” said Matthew Massengill, chairman of the board for Western Digital. “With experience as a software engineer as well as running large semiconductor development projects, his breadth of technology expertise, business acumen and history of building and operating world-class organizations make him the right person to lead Western Digital in a world increasingly driven by applications and data.”

Cisco’s Todd Nightingale

A nearly $20.7 billion company, Western Digital earlier this week announced new WD Gold NVMe SSDs to help small and medium enterprises (SMEs) transition to NVMe. This latest addition to the vendor’s WD Gold family of products will be available in four capacities to channel partners and end customers early next q8arter, the company said.

“The industry is facing an exciting inflection point where customers of every size, vertical and geography are deploying business infrastructure that is software-driven, enabled by data and powered by the cloud. This megatrend has only just now reached an initial stage of adoption and will drive a massive wave of new opportunity,” said Goeckeler. “In this IT landscape, the explosive growth of connected devices will continue fueling an ever-increasing demand for access to data. With large-scale hard disk drive and semiconductor memory franchises, Western Digital is strongly positioned to capitalize on this emerging opportunity and push the boundaries of both software and physical hardware innovation within an extremely important layer of the technology stack.”

Cisco, as reported by the Silicon Valley Business Journal, held an internal meeting on Thursday, announcing the next phase of strategy for the company, including executive leadership changes and a new engineering team structure.