I am delighted to announce that John Oberon has joined Cisco as Vice President, IoT Software Platforms. His responsibilities include the development of platforms that enable developers to access Cisco's IoT infrastructure capabilities.

John's hiring is significant because delivering on the promise of the Internet of Everything -the intelligent connection of people, process, data, and things -means making it possible to deliver vertical solutions to specific industries. To do this, we need to enable a broad ecosystem of technology partners with the right vertical-specific expertise. We will do this by providing the right kind of application platform that offers open APIs and application development environments for customers, partners, and third parties to design, develop, and deploy their innovative solutions.

Crucial to Cisco's strategy is to provide IaaS and PaaS for IoT applications and SaaS offerings to run at the extreme edge/fog. John's joining Cisco and taking on this leadership role in IoT Systems and Software is critical to our being able to deliver these services to our partners, customers, and the broader IoT developer community. Software was indeed a hot topic at Cisco's Partner Summit 2015 last month in Montreal. It's clear that the market needs the right application platform to enable the services that customers will require, and Cisco is recruiting and developing the talent we need to deliver these software platforms.

John has extensive experience building robust developer communities for software platforms -especially within the SaaS and PaaS space. He will be an important Cisco representative in the IoT developer community.

Before joining Cisco, John was the Chief Architect, General Manager, and Vice President of Engineering at Mashery, an Intel business that is a leader in application services governance. Earlier in his career, John was the Director of Product Development at Intuit. He also worked 12 years in key roles at Microsoft.

"I am excited to have a vital role developing Cisco's IoT software platforms and expanding the horizon of what we know as the Internet of Things," John said. "The time is perfect for bringing in top talent and continuing the journey to bring Cisco's IoT software platforms to market."

You can follow John's tweets, read his LinkedIn blog posts, and look for him soon at major developer and Cisco events.