Dive Brief:

• Cisco’s cloud leader Nick Earle announced Tuesday plans to leave the company within the next few months. 

• Earle, senior vice president of Global Cloud and Managed Services Sales, said in a LinkedIn post he plans to leave his current position to pursue working with startups.

• Cisco has undergone a series of  changes recently, including the reorganization of its engineering department and a revamp of its cloud strategy.

Dive Insight:

"It’s been a wild ride and after two years running the worldwide Field Cloud, Software and Managed Services team and 10 years in sales management roles, I've decided to step out of the corporate world and go back to working with startups," Earle said in a post on LinkedIn on Tuesday, according to a CRN report. 

Earle had been leading the charge to the cloud for Cisco. In doing so, he has had to walk a fine line between disrupting competitors who already work in the cloud without upsetting longtime, revenue-generating customers.

But Cisco has yet to take a firm hold in the cloud market, and CEO Chuck Robbins has been working to revise Cisco’s approach to the cloud. In March, Robbins announced plans to reorganize the company's 25,000-employee engineering unit to realign engineers to areas where he sees Cisco's greatest future opportunities: applications and the Internet of Things (IoT), cloud services and platforms, security and networking.

At that time, Robbins also announced that the company’s new cloud services and platforms unit would be led by Zorawar "Biri" Singh, a new hire that he brought aboard.