Cisco ANZ CTO departs, launches own advisory

Cisco ANZ chief technology officer Kevin Bloch will leave the role he has held for 21 years on Friday to start his own technology advisory company.

Bloch spent the last 12 years as CTO of Cisco ANZ and prior to that, held other senior roles within the company.

His new venture, Bloch Advisory Pty Ltd, was established to assist startups, telcos and corporates invest in R&D and commercialise their own technology.

“I have been fortunate to be part of an incredible company, have worked with visionary leaders and led teams of talented, committed individuals and now I’m excited to be establishing my own technology advisory company,” Bloch said.

My goal is to help organisations make strategic investments in innovation, to scale and commercialise their technology and, where appropriate, to export it to the world.”

Bloch originally joined Cisco to create its telecommunications service provider franchise and later headed up Engineering in the region across Cisco’s entire technology portfolio.

He led Cisco’s insertion in APAC into new markets including healthcare, transport and agriculture and was integral to driving some of Cisco’s largest corporate deals, including Telstra’s metro ethernet service, IAG’s core national digital infrastructure and the deployment of Western Australia’s health network across the state.

As part of Cisco’s National Digital Acceleration Programme, Bloch was instrumental in establishing the first Innovation Centres in Australia. These tech hubs, based in Sydney and Perth, brought together corporate, government and venture capital investors and provided them with the opportunity to foster and develop new and exciting technologies created by Australian entrepreneurs.

Prior to Cisco, Kevin held positions with OTC (now Telstra), as well as JNA Telecommunications, a local R&D startup that was eventually acquired by Lucent Technologies.

Bloch is the author of six technology reference books as well as one of the most popular whitepapers on ‘Top ICT Trends in 2020’.

‘Being at the forefront of tech, I have witnessed what the most advanced companies in the world are doing with Artificial Intelligence and automation and I am keen to share those insights with others,” he said.

“These technologies are the future and it is important to understand why and how organisations can harness the benefits to drive innovation and ROI.

“Global leaders routinely invest 10-30 percent of revenue in R&D. In Australia, we typically invest less than 5 percent.

“This paucity of investment is costing us our place on the global leader board of innovation and it’s only going to get worse unless we seriously address this systemic lack of investment in our tech innovators.”