Wide Experiences

Rhonda Henley’s tenure at Cisco spans 23 years and various segments up until her appointment as vice president of the Americas partner organization.

After stints at AT&T and Lucent, she joined Cisco in 2000 as a channel account manager. There she worked in the federal market in tandem with AT&T, Verizon, IBM and Lockheed Martin. She had already worked in public sector sales at Lucent and would go on to work in other public sector roles at Cisco.

Henley went on to managed Cisco’s channel operations with IBM and EMC. Then came an eight-year stint where she oversaw Cicso’s relationship with Accenture.

From 2018 to 2019, she served as sales director for Cisco’s public sector partner organization. And up until last week, she worked as senior director for Cisco’s global partner organization (GPO). GPO has since come to be known as Cisco’s Global Partner and Routes to Market Sales (GPRS) organization.

Henley said her different jobs have taken given her experiences on opposite ends of the market. And she hopes to bring some of those pieces together. On one hand, she said she witnessed the rapid speed of adoption that takes place on the SMB/commercial side. On the other hand, working with large, enterprise-focused partners like Deloitte, Accenture, Capgemini and large Indian service providers taught her about building a long-term, strategic road map.

“That’s what I’ve learned from both ends of the business that I can bring into this current role,” Henley told Channel Futures. “We can couple that speed of execution with how you think long-term and build out a full road map.”