Making AI work for you

Gary Steele, President, Go-to-Market, Cisco

Gary Steele is Cisco’s President, Go-to-Market, leading a unified organization across Cisco’s Sales, Partner, and Global Marketing teams to accelerate customer outcomes and drive growth across the enterprise.

In addition, Gary leads Splunk at Cisco, overseeing more than 7,000 Splunkers who partner with enterprises worldwide to drive digital resilience with its industry-leading security and observability solutions. A highly regarded technology executive and cybersecurity expert with over 30 years of experience, he has a proven track record of successfully scaling SaaS operations and growing multi-billion dollar global enterprises.

Gary served as Splunk’s CEO for two years prior to joining forces with Cisco. Under Gary’s leadership, Splunk delivered a dramatic transformation, driving durable growth with increasing profitability. In two years, Gary led the company to grow total revenues by 58% to $4.216 billion and ARR by 35% to $4.208 billion (from FY22 to FY24). During the same time period, Splunk's adjusted free cash flow generation grew 8.6x to more than $1 billion, and the company also achieved a full fiscal year of GAAP profitability in its final year as an independent company.

Splunk also significantly accelerated product innovation under Gary’s leadership, delivering best-in-class and market-leading capabilities across its unified security and observability portfolio, as well as new AI-powered products through Splunk AI. Today, the team is relentlessly focused on strengthening and broadening its product portfolio, and helping Cisco’s global customers on their journey toward resilience across their entire digital footprint.

In 2023, Gary became a co-chair of Aspen Digital’s U.S. Cybersecurity Group, a leading cross-sector, public-private forum that accelerates the pace of cybersecurity preparedness and response to ultimately drive greater cyber resilience around the world.

Prior to joining Splunk, Gary was the founding CEO of Proofpoint, where he led the company’s growth from an early-stage start-up to a leading, publicly traded security-as-a-service provider. He previously served as CEO of Portera and held various leadership roles at Sybase, Sun Microsystems and Hewlett-Packard.

Gary is an avid supporter of the arts community. Since 2021, Gary has served on the Board of the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art and is a Co-Chair of the Collectors' Forum. Gary has also served as a member of the board of directors of Upwork, a talent freelancing platform, since 2018. He holds a B.S. from Washington State University.

Omar Santos, Distinguished Engineer, Cisco

Omar Santos is a Distinguished Engineer at Cisco focusing on artificial intelligence (AI) security, cybersecurity research, incident response, and vulnerability disclosure. He is a board member of the OASIS Open standards organization and the founder of OpenEoX. Omar's collaborative efforts extend to numerous organizations, including the Forum of Incident Response and Security Teams (FIRST) and the Industry Consortium for Advancement of Security on the Internet (ICASI). Omar is the co-chair of the FIRST PSIRT Special Interest Group (SIG). Omar is the lead of the DEF CON Red Team Village and the chair of the Common Security Advisory Framework (CSAF) technical committee.  

Omar is the author of over 25 books, 21 video courses, and over 50 academic research papers. Omar is a renowned expert in ethical hacking, vulnerability research, incident response, and AI security. He employs his deep understanding of these disciplines to help organizations stay ahead of emerging threats. His dedication to cybersecurity has made a significant impact on technology standards, businesses, academic institutions, government agencies, and other entities striving to improve their cybersecurity programs. Prior to Cisco, Omar served in the United States Marines focusing on the deployment, testing, and maintenance of Command, Control, Communications, Computer and Intelligence (C4I) systems.

Andrew Stewart, National Security and Global Government Senior Strategist for Cybersecurity, Cisco

Andrew Stewart, CAPT, USN (Ret.) is a National Security Senior Strategist for Cybersecurity at Cisco Systems. He joined Cisco after serving almost 30 years in the US Navy where he most recently served as the Chief of Cyber Operations for Fleet Cyber Command/U.S. TENTH Fleet. Andy is a graduate of Sellinger School of Business, Loyola University Maryland and the Cybersecurity & Policy Exec Program from Harvard Kennedy School,  as well as the Naval Postgraduate School Monterey, CA, the US Naval Academy, National Defense University, and the Naval War College.

Daniele Hayes, Vice President, Digital Workplace, Cisco IT

Daniele leads a team responsible for the technology experiences for Cisco team members, connecting them to colleagues, devices, tools, information, and support. Focus areas include Intranet Experience, Workforce Collaboration, Productivity Applications, IT Support, Device Experience, Facilities Management Technology, Engineering Experience, and Events and Video Streaming Services. She is an IT leader with a passion for simplifying technology and providing a productive employee environment. She previously held a variety of positions at IBM, most recently as Vice President of Systems and Tools.