Five9, a provider of contact center software for enterprises, announced the appointment of Cisco veteran Rowan Trollope as CEO.
Rowan Trollope was formerly SVP and general manager of Cisco’s Applications Group.
Mike Burkland, who transitioned from CEO to executive chairman last December due to health reasons will continue as executive chairman.
Barry Zwarenstein, Five9’s CFO, who served as interim CEO during the transition, will continue as chief financial officer.
Dan Burkland will remain president overseeing Five9 customer facing functions which include Sales, Marketing and Services.
Rowan Trollope, as a key member of the CEO’s Executive Leadership Team at Cisco, led the Applications Group, a $5 billion business. Trollope joined Cisco in 2012 to lead the Collaboration Technology Group.
Rowan Trollope’s team reinvented Cisco’s Collaboration business, pivoting to a SaaS model and making design, simplicity and exponential improvement the guiding principles of product development.
As a result, the business returned to growth – with recurring revenue growing in the double digits, margins expanding significantly, market share increasing, and leading Cisco’s shift to recurring revenue.
As a member of Cisco’s Executive Leadership Team, Rowan Trollope’s role expanded to creating a portfolio of new, high growth Enterprise SaaS businesses. This was first realized by turning-around the IoT initiative and building the industry’s #1 connectivity and data delivery platform.
Rowan Trollope next led expansion into the APM space and captured #1 share position, and most recently took responsibility for Cisco’s blockchain strategy.
Across his portfolio, Rowan Trollope applied an integrated approach of organic innovation and strategic M&A such as Broadsoft, AppDynamics and Jasper, and tech partnerships with companies like Apple and Salesforce.
Prior to joining Cisco, Rowan led Symantec’s sales, marketing and product development teams as the Group President, focusing on cloud strategy. He was responsible for growing the company’s software-as-a-service strategy and expanding cloud-based delivery and customer support models.
Mike Burkland’s leadership assisted Five9 to increase revenue by 20x to over $200 million, while the company’s value increased over 100x.
Five9 said its revenue for the first quarter of 2018 increased 25 percent to $58.9 million with gross margin of 58.1 percent.
