John Z, Cisco Application Networking Rock Star

John was the senior Application Networking Architect in the Central US for our team and was the person we called upon to handle the BIG accounts and who closed some of the largest deals to date with our products in that territory. It should be noted that in doing that he also handled many of the most complex pre-sales engagements and designs that our team took on in the past several years. A typical conversation; “That deal sounds pretty complex, who do we have on it? Zaccagnini? OK, we’re all set, next item.”

Piece of cake. That’s how much confidence we had in John. No matter how tough a situation we knew that if he was on it we had our best chance to compete and win and he never let us down.

John was a “think out of the box” SE who showed great initiative in being proactive and getting things done; John was also a teacher, and what made John a guru in my eyes is that he used sales engagements to mentor SE's from our team and the field operation teams on a regular basis. That was second nature to John and I consider having that natural skill to be a hallmark of a great SE. Besides being a great teacher John was very much a team player who was a central figure to the sales teams in the Midwest and was always called upon to advise, train and participate in their meetings and in field engagements with our partners. John also established himself as a trusted advisor to the people who designed and built Cisco technology; the engineering and product development staff we work with who considered John a great sounding board as to how our products could be developed and sold.

John was tireless in his efforts and he built a tremendous reputation. At a recent meeting one of our Enterprise SE Managers couldn't stop telling me how great John is; ("if we could clone 10 of him we’d rule the world..."). I love that remark. I told John over the phone and I think he was embarrassed. Typical John, he never wanted to draw attention to himself but he always did because of how he carried himself and how he set out on his job each day. People couldn’t help but notice that talent.

To put it plainly, John was a Rock Star.

I truly considered John not just the consummate Systems Engineer but a friend and trusted confidant, and I know I speak for our team when I say we will miss him deeply.

Tom Sutliff