Pete Solvik joined Cisco in January 1993 as the company’s CIO. At the time, Cisco was a $500
million company running a UNIX-based software package to support its core transaction processing.
The functional areas supported by the package included financial, manufacturing, and order entry
systems. Cisco was “far and away” the biggest customer of the software vendor that supported the
application.3 Solvik’s experience and the company’s significant growth prospects convinced him that
Cisco needed a change.