Sr. Director, Software Strategy, CTO Office, Cisco Systems

Lauren Cooney has over fifteen years of experience with product management, product marketing & building technical communities/ecosystems, strategies and new businesses (including acquisitions & GTM) across multiple customer audiences (CxO, IT, Partner, Developer) and platforms. Her expertise is in building and growing net-new initiatives and organizations for large companies across diverse customer & user bases around developer offerings, application-driven businesses and services and cloud offerings with a mix of strong innovation and hard business results.

Cooney was recently recognized by Business Insider as one of the top 20 people in Enterprise IT and by the Huffington Post as one of the top 50 cloud computing experts on Twitter. 

Cooney joined Cisco Systems in 2012 to drive new software strategy. At Cisco, she leads cross-organizational efforts that span new GTM strategies, software market strategy, developer ecosystems, application offerings and more across Cisco. Prior to Cisco, Cooney was at Juniper Networks where she led the team that started the Junos Developer Program and drove Developer & Product Marketing for the Software Division, driving new partner, services & developer efforts as well as Product Marketing for SDKs, APIs and platform offerings. She was at Microsoft prior to Juniper, leading the Web Platform team in the Server & Tools Business, focused specifically on driving change in Microsoft’s web strategy, including the cohesion of all of web products into new customer offerings. Her team, along with engineering, brought PHP to Windows and drove developer-focused product management, marketing & GTM for multiple products. Prior to Microsoft, Cooney was a Program Director in the Information Management CTO Office at IBM, focusing on new web technologies and open source. Prior to her role in the CTO Office, Cooney was in the WebSphere Group focused on open source offerings, at BEA Systems leading developer relations efforts and prior to that an investment analyst for a venture capital firm in Silicon Valley.