Fidelma Russo and Jeetu Patel join Equinix Board of Directors

Equinix announced the appointments of Fidelma Russo and Jeetu Patel to the Equinix Board of Directors.

Russo will also serve as a member of the Board’s Audit Committee, and Patel will be joining the Nominating and Governance Committee. Effective June 9, 2022, their appointments bring the number of directors on the Equinix Board to 11.

As Chief Technology Officer at Hewlett Packard Enterprise, Russo leads the innovation agenda and technology roadmap, managing the design and development of the portfolio to deliver GreenLake edge-to-cloud customer experiences to the market. She is passionate about working with customers to help them reimagine their information technology needs and deliver a simple, consumable solution that helps them drive business results.

Patel serves as Cisco‘s Executive Vice President and General Manager of Security and Collaboration. In addition to leading the strategy and development for these businesses, he also owns P&L responsibility for this multibillion-dollar portfolio. Jeetu combines a bold vision, steeped in product design and development expertise, operational rigor and innate market understanding to create high-growth Software as a Service (SaaS) businesses.

Highlights/key facts

• Fidelma Russo was named Chief Technology Officer at Hewlett Packard Enterprise in September 2021. She has more than 30 years of technology leadership spanning cloud services, machine learning and analytics, global IT business services, servers, storage, networking, backup and infrastructure.
• Prior to joining HPE, Russo served as Senior Vice President and General Manager of the Cloud Services business unit at VMware. She has also held several notable senior leadership positions at Iron Mountain, EMC Corp., Hewlett-Packard Co. and Sun Microsystems, and served on the Supervisory board of Wolters Kluwer B.V.
• Russo holds a Bachelor of Engineering degree in electrical engineering from University College Cork, a Master’s in Computer Science from Boston University, and completed the Internet of Things Executive Education program at MIT’s Sloan School of Management. She currently serves as a director of SBA Communications and sits on the Audit Committee and the Nominating and Governance committee.
• A member of the Executive Leadership Team, Jeetu Patel is helping to redefine Cisco’s SaaS business and strategy to further accelerate the company’s transformation and growth. There he is working to build world class, subscription-based products that solve Cisco customers’ biggest problems.
• Prior to joining Cisco, Patel was the Chief Product Officer and Chief Strategy Officer at Box, a role he pioneered. Earlier in his career, Patel served as General Manager and Chief Executive of EMC’s newly acquired Syncplicity business unit. Other key roles at EMC included CMO for the Information Intelligence Group and Chief Strategy Officer, where he drove the organic and inorganic strategy for the division’s cloud and mobile growth. Previously, Patel was President of Doculabs, a research and advisory firm co-owned by Forrester Research.
• Jeetu holds a Bachelor of Science in Information Decision Sciences from the University of Illinois, Chicago, and currently serves on the board of JLL, an American commercial real estate services company.

“We are thrilled to add two accomplished and seasoned business leaders from world-class companies to the Equinix board. We believe Fidelma’s and Jeetu’s careers and vital operating roles provide the relevant experience and deep understanding to be a tremendous benefit as we continue to create long-term distinctive value for Platform Equinix. I look forward to working with them as we support our customers on their digital transformation journeys,” said Peter Van Camp, Executive Chairman, Equinix.