Doug Dennerline spent ten years at Cisco and was most recently Senior Vice President and General Manager of the Collaboration Software Group, making him the man in charge of WebEx and other popular offerings. He was also the one spearheading a rumored move by Cisco to make an online competitor to Microsoft Office and other Web-based collaboration suites.
But today Dennerline is departing the company for CRM- and platform-as-a-service company Salesforce, where he’s becoming its head of enterprise sales in the Americas. Before heading up the SaaS wing at Cisco, he was a senior VP at the commercial and enterprise sales groups.
Dennerline will become the Salesforce executive vice president of enterprise sales in the Americas, meaning that he’ll be moving further away from the kind of product strategy work he did as VP at Cisco’s Collaboration Group.
Salesforce recently posted a 20% increase in revenue for its second quarter, bumping it up to $316.1 million. But in the long term, the company is still facing some competition from both Microsoft and Oracle in the CRM space despite its current dominance. It has also moved into different territory with its Force.com cloud platform for both applications and sites. For both areas, bringing in a leader in sales from Cisco who really groks cloud computing and collaborative software is a serious win for Salesforce.
As for the “why” of the matter for Dennerline, there’s been no comment so far from either Salesforce or Cisco. Whether it was just a case of better opportunities and compensation or something more cultural, it’s unclear at the moment. What is clear is that Cisco is losing a real veteran in a rapidly evolving and lucrative space.
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