David Goeckeler leaves Cisco to become CEO of WD

Western Digital appointed David Goeckeler as CEO, replacing Steve Milligan, who previously announced his intended retirement.

Goeckeler previously served as executive vice president and general manager of Cisco’s $34 billion Networking and Security Business.

“The industry is facing an exciting inflection point where customers of every size, vertical and geography are deploying business infrastructure that is software-driven, enabled by data and powered by the cloud. This megatrend has only just now reached an initial stage of adoption and will drive a massive wave of new opportunity,” said Mr. Goeckeler. “In this IT landscape, the explosive growth of connected devices will continue fueling an ever-increasing demand for access to data. With large-scale hard disk drive and semiconductor memory franchises, Western Digital is strongly positioned to capitalize on this emerging opportunity and push the boundaries of both software and physical hardware innovation within an extremely important layer of the technology stack.”