By Lorenzo Pace
Publication Date: 2026-10-07 12:57:00
A series of meetings in Rome and Milan. Institutions, businesses, partners, employees. Today: investors in Milan, followed by economics students at Luiss. Mark Patterson, Chief Financial Officer (CFO) at Cisco, is in Italy as the country’s ‘executive sponsor’: the group assigns its top managers a market to monitor closely. ‘Every part of the world is different,’ he explains. ‘You can’t just sit in California: you have to understand what customers really need.’
Patterson has been with Cisco for 27 years and has been CFO since July 2025. He takes over at a time when the company’s financial results are on the rise: in the last financial year, revenue was up 12 per cent and profits up 14 per cent; for the current financial year, the forecast is for growth of 15 per cent and 17 per cent respectively. He calls it the ‘supercycle’ of networking: a market that has always been cyclical, linked to GDP, but which, with AI and security, is said to be shifting towards…
