User:Ianwikramanayake/charliegiancarlo

Charles Henry "Charlie" Giancarlo is an entrepreneur, investor, and executive. He is currently the Chief Executive Officer of Pure Storage. He formerly served in senior executive roles at Cisco and Silver Lake Partners.

Education
Giancarlo earned a Bachelor's degree in electrical engineering from Brown University in 1979. He later became a trustee at the university. He also earned Masters' degrees in electrical engineering and business administration from UC Berkeley and Harvard University respectively.

Career
Giancarlo co-founded Telecom Systems and then Adaptive Corporation, before joining Kalplana, an ethernet switch company. He joined Cisco in 1993 through Cisco's acquisition of Kalpana. Giancarlo then worked at Cisco for 14 years.

Giancarlo was Cisco's first VP of Corporate Development. He led Cisco's acquisition and technology alliance strategies. Later, he served as the head of the Commercial Line of Business at Cisco. He later served as a co-leader of Cisco's technology divisions on network switching, voice, storage networking, and network security, as well as serving as the President of the Linksys division.

In 2004, Giancarlo was promoted to Chief Technology Officer and also led Cisco's government division. In 2005, Giancarlo was promoted to Chief Development Officer and Executive Vice President. In that position, he was responsible for all of Cisco's Business Units and divisions, including all research and development for all of Cisco's products. He facilitated a consolidation of Cisco's engineering groups into larger business groups to bring more efficiency into product development.

During Giancarlo’s tenure at Cisco he was credited with initiating many first in the communications industry including the first Ethernet Switch, WiFi products, IP Telephone systems and TelePresence systems.

Giancarlo was seen as a likely successor to CEO John Chambers. Giancarlo reported directly to John Chambers from 1997 to 2002 and from 2004 to 2007. Instead, Giancarlo's resignation was announced in December 2007. He joined Silver Lake Partners as Managing Director. While there, he served as interim CEO at Avaya. He was also part of the team that bought Skype from eBay and responsible for its operational turnaround. Silver Lake sold Skype to Microsoft two years later. In August 2017, Giancarlo was appointed CEO of Pure Storage replacing prior CEO Scott Dietzen.

Charles Giancarlo is the brother of J. Christopher Giancarlo.