Cisco Systems has appointed Girish Rishi to its board of directors, the networking company announced on 9 October 2026. The appointment is effective immediately.
Rishi is chairman and chief executive of Cognite, the industrial software company, and was previously chief executive of the supply chain software firm Blue Yonder.
An industrial software operator on a networking board
The appointment reads as a deliberate addition of operating experience from the industrial end of enterprise technology rather than from networking itself. Cognite builds software that makes sense of data generated by heavy industry, in oil and gas, power, manufacturing and shipping, where the problem is rarely a shortage of sensor readings and almost always the difficulty of turning them into something an engineer can act on.
That is close to the question Cisco faces as it sells into the same plants and refineries. Industrial networking has become one of the clearer growth paths available to a company whose traditional campus and data centre markets are mature, and it is a market where the buyer is an operations director rather than a chief information officer. A director who has sold to that buyer for years brings a perspective the board would otherwise have to acquire indirectly.
A record in supply chain software
Before Cognite, Rishi led Blue Yonder, which sells planning and fulfilment software to retailers and manufacturers, through a period in which supply chain software moved from a back office concern to a board level one. He has also held senior positions at Tyco and at Zebra Technologies, both companies built around tracking physical goods and physical assets.
Taken together that is a career spent at the junction of software and the physical world, which is the part of the enterprise technology market where Cisco's hardware heritage is an advantage rather than a legacy cost.
Board composition and the artificial intelligence question
Cisco has been reshaping its board as it repositions around artificial intelligence infrastructure, security and observability. The practical value of a director who runs an industrial data company is that he has had to answer, with his own revenue at stake, the question every large technology board is now asking: which artificial intelligence applications customers will actually pay for, and which remain demonstrations.
Rishi joins as an independent director. His appointment adds operating experience rather than filling a financial or audit specialism, and it continues a pattern among large technology boards of recruiting sitting chief executives of smaller, faster-moving companies in adjacent markets rather than retired executives from comparable firms.
