Cisco Networking Leader to Become CEO of Fastly

Fastly’s Todd Nightingale

Todd Nightingale is leaving his role at Cisco as executive vice president and general manager of enterprise networking and cloud to become CEO of Fastly.

The Cisco vet will join Fastly on Sept. 1. He will succeed Joshua Bixby, who will step down as CEO and from Fastly’s board of directors. Bixby will remain with Fastly as an adviser.

Nightingale will also join Fastly’s board upon assuming the CEO role.

Fastly is a cloud content delivery provider. It is a New Relic partner. New Relic is a Cisco AppDynamics competitor.

“Fastly is delivering unparalleled application experiences for users around the world with exceptional flexibility, security and performance,” Nightingale said. “I’m honored and grateful for the opportunity to be a part of the Fastly team.”

Cisco sent us the following statement:

“At Cisco, we always want the best for our teams, our people and their continued growth in their careers. We are grateful for Todd’s many contributions to Cisco and congratulate him as he takes on a new opportunity as a CEO of another company in an adjacent market.”

Cisco’s Jonathan Davidson will take on an expanded role leading a new organization that combines enterprise networking and cloud with the mass-scale infrastructure group.

“We are confident that this new team will continue to accelerate innovation for our customers and partners, and drive growth for our business,” Cisco said.

Long History with Cisco

Nightingale managed business strategy and development efforts for Cisco‘s multi-billion-dollar networking portfolio.

Previously, Nightingale was the senior vice president and general manager of Cisco’s Meraki business. He joined Cisco with the Meraki acquisition in 2012.

Before that, he held engineering and senior management positions at AirDefense. There, he was responsible for product development and guided the company through a successful acquisition by Motorola.

Artur Bergman is Fastly’s founder, chief architect and executive chairperson.

“Fastly is extraordinary at the things that make us unique, including our incredibly powerful programmable edge cloud, innovative performance-focused product and engineering, and our unmatched support of customers as they build the next generation of globally performant, secure and reliable applications,” he said. “I’m confident in Todd’s ability to lead the company with the rigor and energy needed to elevate Fastly to its next level of extraordinary technology and product growth, including a strong go-to-market (GTM) motion and operational strengths.”