San Jose, Ca., USA - August 3, 2012, San Jose, Ca., USA - Cisco Systems, Inc. announced the appointment of Marc Benioff and Kristina M. Johnson to its board of directors, effective August 1, 2012.
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Mr. Benioff, the chairman and CEO of salesforce.com., founded the company in 1999 with a vision to create an on-demand information management service that would replace traditional enterprise software technology. Mr. Benioff has been widely recognized for pioneering innovation. In 2010 he was awarded the David Packard Medal of Achievement and was named by Fortune one of the Top 50 People in Business as well as one of the Smartest People in Tech.
He has been honored as the San Francisco Business Times Executive of the Year, the Ernst & Young Entrepreneur of the Year, and the Alumni Entrepreneur of the Year by the University of Southern California Marshall School of Business.
Mr. Benioff was appointed by President George W. Bush as the co-chairman of the President’s Information Technology Advisory Committee and served from 2003-2005, overseeing the publishing of critical reports on health care information technology, cybersecurity, and computational sciences. Mr. Benioff is also the author of three books, most recently the national best seller Behind the Cloud.
In 2007 the Committee Encouraging Corporate Philanthropy presented Mr. Benioff with the coveted Excellence in Corporate Philanthropy Award and a year later welcomed Mr. Benioff to its distinguished board of directors. In 2008, for his thought and action leadership in corporate responsibility, CRO Magazine named him CEO of the Year.
Prior to launching salesforce.com, Mr. Benioff, a 30-year veteran of the software industry, spent 13 years at Oracle Corporation from 1986-1999. In 1984, he worked as an assembly language programmer in Apple Computer’s Macintosh Division. He founded entertainment software company Liberty Software in 1979 when he was 15 years old. Mr. Benioff received a Bachelor of Science in Business Administration from the University of Southern California in 1986.
Dr. Johnson served as Under Secretary of Energy at the Department of Energy in Washington, D.C. from May 2009 until October 2010. Prior to her appointment as Under Secretary, Dr. Johnson was Provost and Senior Vice President for Academic Affairs at The Johns Hopkins University (September 2007 to April 2009), and Dean of the Pratt School of Engineering at Duke University from July 1999 until September of 2007.
She received her B.S. (with distinction), M.S., and Ph.D. in electrical engineering from Stanford University. After a NATO post-doctoral fellowship at Trinity College, Dublin, Ireland, she joined the University of Colorado-Boulder’s faculty in 1985 as an Assistant Professor and was promoted to full Professor in 1994. From 1994 to 1999 Dr. Johnson directed the NSF/ERC for Optoelectronics Computing Systems Center at the University of Colorado and Colorado State University.
Named an NSF Presidential Young Investigator in 1985 and a Fulbright Faculty Scholar in 1991, Dr. Johnson’s academic awards include the Dennis Gabor Prize for creativity and innovation in modern optics (1993) and the John Fritz Medal (2008), widely considered the highest award in the engineering profession. Previous recipients of the Fritz Medal include Alexander Graham Bell, Thomas Edison and Orville Wright.
Dr. Johnson was inducted into the Women in Technology International Hall of Fame (2003), and received the Society of Women Engineers Lifetime Achievement Award (2004), the ARCS Foundation Eagle Award for science and education (2009), and the Woman of Vision Award for Leadership by the Anita Borg Institute for Women and Technology (2010).
Recognized for her work in technology transfer and entrepreneurship by the States of Colorado and North Carolina (1997, 2001); she received the 2010 Milton Steward Award from the Small Business Technology Council (SBTC), and is a fellow of the Optical Society of America, International Electronics and Electrical Engineering (IEEE), SPIE, the International Society for Optical Engineering (former Board Member) and the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS). Dr. Johnson serves on the Board of Directors of Boston Scientific Corporation, AES Corporation and the African Wildlife Foundation.
Dr. Johnson has co-founded several companies, including SouthEast Techinventures, and ColorLink, Inc., which was sold to RealD, and is responsible for 3D effects in movies such as Avatar, Monster House, Chicken Little, Meet the Robinson’s, Hannah Montana and others. She is currently Chief Executive Officer of Enduring Energy, LLC, which she co-founded after leaving the Department of Energy in late 2010. ■