Episode 273 Deep Dive: Jeetu Patel | The Future of Security

In this episode, we welcome Jeetu Patel, Executive Vice President and Chief Product Officer at Cisco, to delve into the future of cybersecurity and its impact on cloud-based software. Jeetu shares his insights on the detrimental effects of monopolies in the industry and the complexities faced by Chief Information Security Officers (CISOs). He emphasizes the importance of resilience, updates, and collaboration in addressing security challenges and predicting exponential innovation.

Jeetu Patel is Cisco’s Executive Vice President and General Manager of Security and Collaboration. He leverages a diverse set of capabilities to lead the strategy and development for these businesses and also owns P&L responsibility for this multibillion-dollar portfolio. Jeetu combines a bold vision, steeped in product design and development expertise, operational rigor and innate market understanding to create high growth Software as a Service (SaaS) businesses.

A member of the Executive Leadership Team, Jeetu is helping to redefine Cisco’s SaaS business and strategy to further accelerate the company’s transformation and growth. His mission is to build world class, subscription-based products that solve Cisco customers’ biggest problems. His team is creating and designing meaningfully differentiated products that diverge in the way they’re conceived, built, priced, packaged and sold.

Prior to joining Cisco, Jeetu was the Chief Product Officer (CPO) and Chief Strategy Officer (CSO) at Box, a role he pioneered. He led the company’s product and platform strategy, setting the company’s long-term vision and roadmap for cloud content management in the enterprise. He transformed Box from a single product application to a multi-product platform used by 100K customers representing 69% of the Fortune 500. The discipline, quality standards, performance metrics, and stability Jeetu instilled fueled the platform’s growth – nearly quadrupling revenues to $700M+. Box’s growth scaled to reach over 60M users with over 50% of customers using multiple products. He also created the Box Platform business unit where he led product strategy, marketing and developer relations – driving products from incubation stage to mature offerings.

Before joining Box, Jeetu was General Manager and Chief Executive of EMC’s newly acquired Syncplicity business unit, a cloud service for Enterprise File Sync Sharing (EFSS) and collaboration. One of the first SaaS-based solutions offered by EMC, Jeetu spearheaded the company’s acquisition. He created a world class leadership team, secured some of the market’s largest customers and led the group to become one of the fastest growing EFSS companies in a highly competitive market. Other key roles at EMC included CMO for the Information Intelligence Group and Chief Strategy Officer, where he drove the organic and inorganic strategy for the division’s cloud and mobile growth.

Previously, Jeetu was President of Doculabs, a research and advisory firm co-owned by Forrester Research. The firm focused on collaboration and content management across a range of industries including financial services, insurance, energy, manufacturing and life sciences.

He currently serves on the boards of JLL, an American commercial real estate services company, and Equinix, the world’s digital infrastructure company.

Jeetu holds a B.S. in Information Decision Sciences from the University of Illinois, Chicago, and lives in the San Francisco Bay Area with his family.