January 1, 2001

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Innovators And Influencers 2001

Cisco VP Strikes Out On Her Own

Jayshree Ullal takes time off to mentor some next-generation ventures

By Saroja Girishankar

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ehind every high-flying company and its top brass are keen innovators and strategists. Jayshree Ullal, general manager and VP of Cisco Systems' switching group, is one such person. She's been the force behind the company's phenomenal success in switching and with enterprise customers, a unit that grew to a whopping $5 billion under her leadership for the past five years.

Brilliant, insightful, influential, and energetic: Those are some of the adjectives colleagues, bosses, and industry watchers use to describe Ullal, who's been on a leave of absence from Cisco since the spring to pursue new ventures in the switching arena. Cisco CEO John Chambers credits Ullal's success to her "ability to grasp new markets and technology changes and marry them to customer needs."

Ullal is serving as a strategic adviser for Confluence, a startup that's developing IP-based storage servers. It's one of several new ventures in which Ullal is involved. "2001 will be the year to focus on next-generation networking that relates to serious issues, such as storage, content, dynamic bandwidth for applications, and voice applications over IP," Ullal says.

Vinod Khosla, founding CEO of Sun Microsystems and general partner at venture-capital firm Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers, calls Ullal an "industry mover who combines a unique understanding of marketplace needs with up-and-coming technologies." As a result, Khosla's firm is funding two startups--Web server company Abeona Networks and voice-over-IP venture IPUnity. Ullal is a strategic adviser to Abeona and sits on the board of IPUnity. She also advises and is on the board of Nishan Systems, a developer of storage-over-IP systems.

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Ullal's career has been a whirlwind journey. In 1989, at the age of 28 with a degree in engineering, she rose from her role as Ungermann-Bass' general manager for internetworking business to a key marketing position at startup Crescendo Communications, a Fiber Distributed Data Interface-copper switching venture. She landed the spot at Cisco's switching and enterprise unit when Cisco acquired Crescendo in 1993.

As VP of marketing at Crescendo, Ullal recognized that demand for 100-Mbps FDDI to the desktop was scant and expensive. Instead, FDDI could serve as a robust backbone technology. She wanted to marry Ethernet and FDDI, a new concept that had many doubters. "I've tried not to be religious about technologies," she says. "The Crescendo VCs took a chance on me when I said we needed to blend [10Base-T and 100Base-T] Ethernet LAN switching to the desktop with FDDI at the backbone."

Ullal was right. Geoff Yang, a founding partner of Redpoint Ventures, says Ullal has her finger on the evolving needs of the market and is quick to translate those demands into strategic and technological solutions. Yang is so convinced about Ullal's ability to tap into future technologies that he's funding some of the ventures she works with.

Ullal knows success in the Web era is tricky, but she likes her role as mentor. Whether she'll return to Cisco is uncertain; what's clear is that her options appear limitless.

Photo by Gary Parker

Continue on to Nancy Li, CEO of CA's iCan-ASP Inc.

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