Cisco M&A Boss Departs For Private Equity Gig

Charles Carmel, a 10-year Cisco veteran most recently vice president, corporate development, has joined Warburg Pincus as a managing director, the firm confirmed Tuesday. Warburg Pincus is based in New York and manages more than $30 billion in assets.

"Charles’ experience and expertise in venture capital, M&A and technology are an excellent fit with Warburg Pincus’ growth-oriented approach to investing," said Pat Hackett, a Warburg Pincus managing director who heads its technology, media and telecommunications group, in a statement e-mailed to CRN. "We look forward to Charles adding to the breadth and depth of our global TMT platform by leveraging his network of relationships he has cultivated in Silicon Valley and throughout the sector worldwide."

During 10 years spent at Cisco, Carmel assisted with some of the networking titan's biggest acquisitions, including Scientific Atlanta in 2005, WebEx in 2007 and Tandberg in 2009. Before Cisco, Carmel was an investment banker at Goldman Sachs.

Cisco did not respond to a request by CRN for comment on Carmel's departure. In a statement sent to Fortune earlier Tuesday, Cisco said Hilton Romanski will be the new head of its corporate business development team, and confirmed that Carmel had left to "pursue another opportunity." Romanski was most recently an executive with Cisco's Service Provider Business Unit, but had previously spent nearly a decade as part of Cisco's Corporate Development Team, according to Cisco.

Carmel's exit is only the latest in a series of high-profile executive departures from Cisco as the company restructures its global sales and engineering units and seeks to remove $1 billion in expenses by the end of its fiscal 2012.

Several executives have left major, channel-facing technology companies for private equity gigs this year. Before Carmel, the most notable was Marius Haas, senior vice president and general manager for HP Networking, who left HP to become an industry advisor for Kohlberg Kravis Roberts & Co.