The 2024 Hispanic Heritage Month edition of Hispanic Engineer magazine features Guillermo Diaz, Jr. as one of the 50 people in tech to watch. The magazine has been documenting Diaz’s career journey since he joined Cisco in 2000. (Photo credit: Archive cover of Hispanic Engineer magazine published in the fall of 2018).
Diaz learned about telecommunication networks in the U.S. Navy, where he served as an enlisted sailor and gained valuable experience.
In an interview with Hispanic Engineer magazine’s 2018 Hispanic Heritage Month edition, Diaz mentioned that working in the Navy allowed him to securely communicate between ships, airplanes, and shore.
At the age of eighteen, Diaz joined the Navy to explore the world. With limited opportunities for college funding or scholarships, he opted for a job training in the Navy instead of pursuing higher education directly.
In an interview with Hispanic Executive, Diaz revealed that his initial ambition was to become a fighter pilot, but his mother recognized his potential in the field of communications.
Diaz’s military scholarship led to a Bachelor of Science in business administration from Regis University in Colorado and provided great opportunities in the world of technology. After leaving the Navy, he took on more IT and networking roles.
Before joining Cisco in 2000, he served as the director of network services for computer hardware and software manufacturers, senior director of information technology for a computer distribution firm, and telecoms manager for a pharmaceutical and medical systems corporation.
As a transformational innovator across Cisco Systems and the technology industry, Diaz developed a strong track record for accelerating results through people, processes, and technology.
He served as Cisco’s Global Chief Information Officer and was responsible for the IT organization, strategy, and services.
Diaz was a significant driver of the development of Cisco network and management systems and Cisco’s Internet and intranet foundations: Cisco.com and Cisco Employee Connection.
He also led business IT application areas such as Cisco’s $48B+ electronic commerce, technical services, professional services, sales and marketing, customer service, Cisco Capital, and cloud/SaaS platforms.
“We’re now a security company,” Diaz told Hispanic Engineer magazine. “We’ve grown up as an infrastructure/network company. That’s what we’re known for—building out the Internet. But over the last five-plus years, we’ve also grown to become a security company.”
Diaz quickly added that security was always part and parcel of the network, so it’s in Cisco’s DNA. Security runs through all jobs in IT and networking.
“Whether they are in the actual group developing products or services software as a service asset around security,” he said.
To illustrate his point, Diaz pointed to acquisitions such as OpenDNS, which is the foundation of Cisco’s overall cloud security strategy.
A few years earlier, Cisco had bought Sourcefire, a leader in intelligent cybersecurity solutions. There’s also Talos, which Diaz said monitors the activity in ALL our lives. If you owned a Cisco security product, you were harnessing the power of Talos’s threat intelligence, which flowed to every one of their products and the network, the company’s tagline read.
Since 1998, the Cisco Networking Academy has changed the lives of over 8 million students worldwide by providing education, technical training, and career mentorship.
Networking Academy students got priority job access from the academy’s pool of select employment partners, such as IBM, Verizon, Red River, CDW, and Cisco.
Diaz’s team worked closely with the Cisco Corporate Affairs team and helped support the platforms that the Network Academy built for those students.
All the learning platforms and capabilities offered to the students were built by Diaz’s IT team, which partnered very closely with Cisco’s corporate social responsibility team so that students could gain access to digital and entrepreneurial skills in the academy.
As the world moves to the next industrial wave, Diaz said the skills needed by college grads and professionals are the same as those of students in the Networking Academy. They included the following:
“When you’re (Cisco) black belt, you become a cybersecurity expert, and that’s true for anyone in IT, programming, or other areas. We’re constantly putting the education part into practice,” he said. “We’re making sure everyone is thinking of security up front, teaching the foundations of the network, programming, and orchestration and how it connects to the end and Internet of Things.”
With Cisco routers just about everywhere on the planet and the International Space Station, Diaz had a lot to keep him up at night.
“I have to wake up every morning with a team, a mindset, and the skills to support security as a very key component of Cisco’s infrastructure,” Diaz said. “I’m a network guy. I grew up with a secure network, and Cisco’s the perfect place for me.”
More recently, Diaz has served as the Chairman of the Hispanic Technology Council (HITEC). Additionally, he is the founder and CEO of Conectado Inc., a Web 3/AI digital platform with a mission to increase access to opportunities for underrepresented individuals.
Furthermore, he sits on the Board of Directors for Blue Shield of California and Jack in the Box (JACK), as well as on the social impact boards for the Cristo Rey High School Work Study program, Npower (which supports veterans and young adults), and the Stanford Latino Entrepreneur Initiative.
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