Cisco Exec Leaves to Head Dell’s Data Center Tech Group

Paul Pérez, who until recently served on the leadership team for Cisco’s server products, will lead the Dell data center technologies business, Dell said Monday.

In the same announcement, the company also said Rory Reed, former CEO of chipmaker AMD, has joined Dell as chief operating officer and president of worldwide commercial sales. Read left AMD last year, his role taken over by the company’s then chief operating officer Lisa Su.

At Cisco, Pérez was both vice president and general manager for the group responsible for the Silicon Valley IT giant’s Unified Computing System server line and CTO of its data center business group. He oversaw Cisco’s tech strategy for converged infrastructure, virtualization, and private-cloud automation.

While Pérez had been at Cisco for the past three and a half years, he is a long-time HP man. He spent close to thirty years working for the Palo Alto-based Silicon Valley legend, starting in the 80s as a designer working on the PA-RISC chip architecture (used in now-defunct Itanium processors) and eventually becoming chief technologist, firs for HP StorageWorks and then for industry-standard servers and software.

As CTO of Dell’s enterprise solutions group, Pérez will help drive the company’s long-term enterprise-tech strategy. Both he and Read will report to the company’s chief commercial officer Marius Haas.

Read served as AMD CEO for more than three years before announcing his resignation in October 2014. He was president and chief operating officer for Lenovo for five years prior to joining AMD. Before that, he spent more than 20 years working for IBM.

Dell was number-three server vendor in the world by revenue in 2014, according to IDC. HP was first, and IBM was second. Cisco was fourth, following Dell.