Patel, who has led Cisco’s security and collaboration business units since August 2020, previously spent more than five years leading Box’s product and platform strategy, setting the company’s long-term vision and road map for cloud content management in the enterprise. He previously served as general manager and chief executive of EMC’s newly acquired Syncplicity business unit, a cloud service for enterprise file sync sharing and collaboration. Other key roles during his more than five years at EMC included chief marketing officer for the Information Intelligence Group and chief strategy officer. Before EMC, Patel was president of Doculabs, a research and advisory firm co-owned by Forrester Research that focused on collaboration and content management across a range of industries including financial services, insurance, energy, manufacturing and life sciences.