Joe Vaccaro, Vice President and General Manager, Cisco ThousandEyes, on what time in tech has taught him so far
What would you describe as your most memorable achievement?
I think of my career as a novel, where every job is a different chapter that has offered me new opportunities to learn and grow. I’ve had the opportunity to work at some amazingly innovative companies and teams, especially alongside the two co-founders of ThousandEyes, Mohit Lad and Ricardo Oliveira, as we brought ThousandEyes inside Cisco in 2020.
What first made you think of a career in technology?
Perhaps somewhat unexpectedly, I come from a family of Northern California farmers. My father and grandfather started a sunflower seed agriculture business that serves customers worldwide. A lot of the lessons learned in the agricultural business and the visceral fruits of labour that come from it have influenced my thinking and approach to my own career.
What style of management philosophy do you employ with your current position?
People, product, performance. Always in that order. ThousandEyes’ technology is unmatched in the industry, but it would be nothing without the world-class team behind it. If you focus on attracting and empowering the best team, they will help build the best product, a team that obsesses over solving the toughest customer problems. And if you do this, then the business performance will follow.
How do you deal with stress and unwind outside of the office?
For me it’s all about balance. I love my family. They keep me grounded. When I get home, even if it’s been a tough day, my two young kids just want to run and give me a hug and then head out to play on the grass. Becoming a parent is a great equaliser that ensures you stay balanced in life.
With the rest of my (limited) free time, I love the outdoors. If I could design the perfect day, I’d spend the first half on the ski slopes, add in a round of golf, and then spend the evening fly fishing on the Upper Sacramento River.
If you could go back and change one career decision, what would it be?
Early in my career I joined a small company and realised within the year that it was a mistake. I was miserable. In hindsight, everything lined up (position, domain, compensation) except the team. Learning from my experiences, I now coach people that in order to succeed and feel happy in your career you have to feel convicted and resonate with more than the technology and career opportunity; you need to want to work with the team and feel you will learn from them. It’s the veto card.
All the chapters of my career novel have brought me to where I am today, and for that I am grateful. Having spent the past five years as Head of Product at Cisco ThousandEyes and now as the new General Manager, I’m thrilled about my own next chapter and that of the business. In early June, we announced Digital Experience Assurance, the new era of assuring digital experiences across every network, radically shifting IT operations from monitoring to action. To spearhead this is the honour of a lifetime.
What do you think has emerged as the technology trend of 2024 and why?
AI will have a similar impact on business as the Internet has. It’s fundamentally reshaping businesses and creating new opportunities for IT operations. We’re at a stage where the dataset generated by a business is beyond human scale, and intelligence lives in harnessing the data for new applications.
Using ThousandEyes as an example, AI-native solutions allow us to take more than 650 billion daily measurements across the globe, correlate insight, and provide that intelligence to our customers. This empowers them with quick and actionable insight as to what issues are occurring across both the owned and unowned environments that they rely on to run their business and deliver digital services. Not only can we leverage AI to quickly see what’s happening across the global Internet, but we can apply models to predict and forecast conditions to optimise performance. Used right, AI is a game changer.
What do you currently identify as the major investment areas in your industry?
Digital experiences are more complex than ever before. But at the same time, more critical than ever. Hospitals can’t provide patient care without their networks. Grocery stores stand still if their point-of-sale machines can’t connect to the Internet. Workers connect from home, cafes, aeroplanes, and more. Powering all of this is the Internet, which has become the delivery mechanism for mission-critical customer and employee applications, services, and websites. The ability to manage not just the environment you own but the ones you don’t, has become mission critical.
As part of the broader industry focus and investment to achieve digital resilience in the face of outages and other disruptions, Digital Experience Assurance is an emerging IT management discipline that maps and visualizes the unowned portion of digital delivery together with the owned portion to create a unified view and understanding of how an experience is delivered to users.
It’s an approach based on AI-native functionality and access to data across internal and external environments at scale to quickly pinpoint the source of an issue and generate recommendations to guide or automate action across the entirety of the underlying infrastructure that impacts the delivery of a digital experience. There’s a competitive advantage for businesses to adapt to these new environments, and we’ll continue to see innovation.
