Rakesh Thaker

Rakesh Thaker is the Chief Development Officer at Ping Identity, where he leads world-wide R&D and cloud operations.
Rakesh brings over 25 years of engineering leadership experience, having successfully led technology organizations at various private and public companies through their hypergrowth, sustaining growth, and turnaround phases.
Most recently, Rakesh was the Vice President of Enterprise networking at Cisco, managing a portfolio that delivered $3B+ in annual sales. Prior to that, Rakesh held leadership roles at Gigamon, Blue Coat, and Dell, where he transformed and scaled diverse teams across the world, building enterprise-class SaaS, security, and networking products. Rakesh has a proven
track record of driving innovation while building a culture of operational excellence, agility, and sharp customer focus. Throughout his career, Rakesh has delivered several game-changing strategic products, many of which were company firsts that propelled them into new markets and rapid growth. Rakesh has successfully integrated acquisitions, and is particularly adept at inspiring, and retaining the founding team and entrepreneurs of the acquired companies to grow the combined new business. He also has deep experience setting up & scaling offshore R&D centers, and co-development with customers & partners.