As a child, Tom Gillis had one parent who was an engineer and one who was a musician. His father worked at Raytheon while his mother was a concert pianist who played with the Boston Symphony Orchestra. But music, while a joy, wasn’t encouraged as a career.
“She used to say to me, I want you to love music, appreciate music, but I forbid you to make it your living,” Gillis told IT Brew. “And of course, I’m like, okay, cool, I’ll be an engineer. And so I was programmed from the beginning to be an engineer.”
Gillis took his mom’s advice. He’s now Cisco’s SVP and general manager of infrastructure and security, the latest evolution in a nearly 40-year career in tech—but he still plays a mean saxophone.
Gillis joined Raytheon in 1987 right out of school at Tufts; 20 years later, after two Masters degrees at Northwestern and Harvard, he joined Cisco for the first time as VP and general manager of the company’s security technology group.
“Then I had an idea around hypervisor security, and so I went and started a company called Bracket Computing that was acquired by VMware,” Gillis said.
At VMware, Gillis ran the security and networking side of the business. After Broadcom’s acquisition of the company in 2023, Gillis moved back to Cisco to build “a next generation network security solution” called Hypershield. He’s been there ever since.
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Next up? AI.
“We launched a thing called AI Defense, and then AI Defense became a feature in this Hypershield firewall,” Gillis said. “And the Hypershield firewall is a feature in a catalyst or a Nexus switch. So, we’re bringing advanced security into the network, and then we’re bringing the network right into the compute complex.”
Cisco is expanding to work alongside large firms like Nvidia, as well, to expand the capabilities of GPUs and processing elements. That’s where his position has him now, expanded in December 2024 to take charge of a portfolio that includes software and hardware.
“I’m general manager for infrastructure and security, which means the silicon, the optics, the networking, all the security services and network services,” Gillis said.
AI has accelerated the infrastructure process, and at Cisco, Gillis said, taking advantage of the need for an integrated system from network to firewalls is an opportunity. It’s a synergy process that lines up with his skill set.
Though he’s bullish on AI’s potential to make work easier, Gillis isn’t concerned that it will be the disruptor it’s projected to be in some nightmare scenarios.
“The personal computer took away the typewriter job, but the world moved on pretty fast, right?” Gillis said. “We’re like, cool, no more typewriters, we all found new things to do, so that precedent, I think, stands.”