Guido Jouret, vice president of Cisco and general manager of the company’s Internet of Things (IoT) group, has resigned. Cisco announced on Thursday that Jouret had left to “pursue a new opportunity.”
A story in Computerworld notes that the resignation comes just as the race to connect sensors and devices over networks is starting to heat up, with IoT now beginning to stimulate the engineering and venture capital interest that presages a technology boom.
Jouret was in charge of Cisco’s development of products to meet the challenge of making IoT a reality. Tasks include how to connect large numbers of new devices like cars, cameras, environmental sensors and HVAC systems. Earlier this year Cisco introduced hardened outdoor routers that run Linux to handle processing at the remote edge of wireless networks.
Jouret also brought Cisco into industry groups that are working on standardizing the technology that will run IoT. Later this year the company is scheduled to host its second annual IoT World Forum conference in Chicago.
The Internet of Things represents a huge opportunity for the networking giant. Cisco has estimated that IoT and the business intelligence related to it could generate US$19 trillion in value over the next ten years. Cisco is well positioned to reap huge rewards as it already sells most of the gear networks run on.
Still, while Cisco has been forward thinking in its approach to IoT, Computerworld quotes Infonetics Research analyst Godfrey Chua as saying that the company hasn’t done all it could to show enterprise customers exactly what it will look like in reality. “I think there’s an impatience in the market in terms of getting answers from Cisco,” Chua says.
With Jouret gone, Cisco’s senior vice president Rob Soderbery, who oversees the company’s enterprise networking and IoT groups, will be assuming direct leadership of the group.
Cisco (Nasdaq: CSCO) may have more to say about where its IoT plans will go from here when it hosts the Cisco Live customer conference in San Francisco later this month.