Cisco Borderless Networks Boss Takes Leave Of Absence

Brett Galloway, senior vice president of Cisco's Network Services Group, is taking a 12-month leave to spend more time with his family, according to a Cisco spokesperson, and is expected to return.

"We anticipate that Brett will return to Cisco after his leave of absence," said the spokesperson.

The Cisco groups under Galloway's leadership cover CIsco's edge and access routing products, its wireless LAN and WAN products, its security products and systems, its policy management, network access control and government security products, and its application delivery products. According to Galloway's Cisco bio, he also leads strategy and planning for Enterprise Businesses.

All of those businesses will report into Padmasree Warrior and Pankaj Patel, Cisco senior vice presidents and the co-leaders of Cisco's Engineering, while Galloway is out.

Galloway joined Cisco in 2005 following Cisco's $450 million acquisition of Airespace, the wireless LAN specialist at which Galloway was president and CEO. He became a Cisco senior vice president in 2008, overseeing Cisco's wireless and security groups, and in 2009 added the enterprise routing businesses to his reports.

Galloway takes leave during a transitional time at Cisco, which is in the midst of a major corporate restructuring and has bid goodbye to a number of well-known Cisco executives in the past year.

Other recent departures from Cisco include Alan Cohen, Cisco vice president, Enterprise and Public Sector, who is also an Airespace alumnus and who confirmed earlier this week he was joining network virtualization startup Nicira.

In addition, Stephanie Carullo, formerly Cisco's worldwide vice president of sales for data center and virtualization, is now a vice president of sales at Apple, according to her LinkedIn profile.