Today in Tech: Cisco's Padmasree Warrior, Zynga, Salman Rushdie and Headcount growth

Padmasree Warrior, Cisco's CTO, moves up We might not know the CTOs of several MNCs, but Cisco's is an exception. We all know Padmasree Warrior. She is from India: she studied at IIT-Delhi before going to Cornell and settling in Motorola for over 20 years until Cisco lured her. ("I think John Chambers really worked at it. It took me a year to say yes", she told Forbes India earlier.) Warrior is also pretty active on twitter, - over 10,000 tweets, some of them endearingly personal and more than 1.4 million followers.

Warrior is in news today after Cisco said she will take on an additional role as its Chief Strategy Officer. Ned Hooper, who was driving strategy for the company, has moved out to start an investment fund.

I have listened to Warrior a few times during her trips to India. She is good on stage - coming out as both engaging and authoritative. Engaging because she had a knack of looking at an issue not as a technology problem, but as a business problem, and looking farther into the future. ("A CTO today needs to be able to combine technology expertise with business models", she told my colleague Mitu Jayashankar). And her authority came from being in the field for a long time.

These qualities will definitely help her in the expanded role. What distinguished Hooper was his ability to take big bets, and do big deals. Some of them - Tandberg, Webex, Starent - helped in Cisco's growth, and some - like Flip - did not work out well. Even till recently, the talk was that Hooper will succeed Chambers.

While some reports have said that Warrior is not a contender for the top job, that option cannot be ruled out, as Bloomberg pointed out. Which is why what she does as CSO will be crucial.

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Here are two videos I found interesting. The first, is a talk given by Warrior at Google mostly about technology, and the second, is a conversation that dwells on the softer aspects of leadership.

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gWL841Mqsus[/youtube]

[vimeo]http://vimeo.com/38549900[/vimeo]

Zynga gets into social network for gamers; Salman Rushie into an Iranian vidoe game
We all came to know about a company called Zynga because of Facebook - and after we started seeing virtual farms in every other desktop instead of nuggets about what people ate. (I thought Farmville was stupid - till I started playing it. For many weeks, I was logging onto facebook only to play the game. It took me a long time before it struck me that my first impression was right). Now, Zynga has announced that it plans to start its own social network for gamers. It was somewhat expected. Facebook's user addition is slowing down in west, and the time people spend on the social network is dropping too. In the developing world, it's likely that more people will access it through the mobile devices rather than through web. Zynga can't afford to depend entirely on Facebook.

While we are on games, Guardian reports that Salman Rushdie, against whom Ayatollah Khomeni issued a fatwa, is the subject of a new video game "aimed at aimed at spreading to the next generation the message about his "sin"". The video game - The Stressful Life of Salman Rushdie and Implementation of his Verdict' - is still under development. The news reminded me of a scene in Minority Report - where a desperate man goes to a video games shop to virtually kill his boss.

Headcount - too linear still?
I got some responses for the three charts I posted yesterday - most of them asking me take it further. One suggestion was to include projected earnings / revenues instead of historical earnings. (A friend was kind enough to send me the projected earnings of the three companies). Another said, compare these numbers in a single chart. And one asked me to compare the revenue/profit growth with headcount growth. I could do only the third. Here it is.

I am afraid there are no big surprises - especially when you account for eServe acquisition by TCS and the fact that Cognizant was running very low utilisation rates in 2004-05-06 period anticipating huge growth. In effect, the chart simply shows that linear growth still rules Indian IT sector.

Also of interest

• FBI arrests 24 hackers in $205M credit card fraud scheme: Venture Beat
• Do You Have the Digital Leaders You Need? : HBR Blog

The thoughts and opinions shared here are of the author.