Tony Shakib Leaves Cisco to be General Manager for IoT at Microsoft

People moves aren’t unusual in the corner offices as folks shift from company to company to find new challenges or a better fit, and in the tech space, it’s even more common. One such move this week is making big waves across the IoT, however, and everyone is looking for underlying causes.

According to a recent announcement, Tony Shakib, VP in charge of Cisco’s IoT Business, has made a seemingly sudden jump from the Silicon Valley gateway and Fog giant to join Microsoft in Redmond, Washington, as the GM for the company’s IoT Business. Shakib was VP, Internet of Everything Vertical Solutions Engineering at Cisco and was responsible for advancing the company’s IoT platforms and helping Cisco and its channel partners to sell IoT in specific verticals.

For the past three years, he led Cisco’s IoT architecture and engineering effort to create customer prototypes, pilots and Cisco validated solutions, according to his Cisco bio. Cisco has confirmed that Shakib is no longer with the company and declined to provide any details regarding who would replace him or if it was looking to fill the position.

There has been no word from Microsoft about the appointment of Shakib as the General Manager for Microsoft’s IoT Business.

There’s been a spate of departures from Cisco’s engineering departments since the 2015 hiring of CEO Chuck Robbins, and the tech world is all atwitter with speculation and rumor about why. I tend to think it’s more of a conflation of correlation and causation, with the added complication of Cisco being such a high-profile proponent and leader in IoT.

Of course, Microsoft has been making its own big moves over the past 18 months, and this is just the latest smart, strategic move to make sure the software company stays in front of the IoT industry, much like it did when it created the PC marketplace in the 1980s and ‘90s.