About

Lee Calcote is a highly accomplished technologist, entrepreneur, advisor, and author with over 25 years of relevant experience. He is passionate about empowering engineers and currently focuses on the third step of the cloud native journey and the fifth layer of distributed systems. Currently serving as an Advisory Board Member at Cisco, Lee has held several senior software engineering manager positions at the company in the past. He has recruited, led, and served talented, worldwide teams engineering a sprawling suite of Cisco Cloud products. He navigated consecutive software releases on-time with high quality, focusing on building vendor-agnostic “cloud executive” software for the world of many clouds, providing a common substrate of services across disparate cloud technologies from an application-centric vantage point. Lee has managed multi-million dollar budgets and over an 80-person, globally-distributed organization. He founded a nearshore team in Canada, benefitting cost savings of ~60% and productivity by time zone proximity. Lee has been instrumental in the creation of the first version of Cisco Intercloud (Openstack-based hybrid cloud). As cloud management leaders, his team, software, and he founded the initial architecture and engineering delivery of these platform capabilities: Service Assurance, User Experience & Interface, and Cloud Marketplace. He has advanced Cisco’s thought leadership by developing a comprehensive business plan and secured funding for a separate R&D team to innovate product ventures, focusing on DevOps needs when continuously delivering cloud-native applications (CI/CD, PaaS, Puppet). Lee founded Docker@Cisco community, stewarding the use of containers within emerging product offerings and led the creation of Cisco Container Hub as an enterprise container image hub, supporting Docker and rkt. Lee has a BS in Computer Science from the University of South Dakota and California State University, Fresno, and an MBA in Masters of Business Administration from California State University, Fresno. He is a visionary leader who has produced 10+ software releases on-time with high quality and a highly available product architecture. Armed with the agile manifesto, he has championed the shift to Agile processes and program delivery across business units.