Charles Giancarlo

Charles Giancarlo is a managing director of Silver Lake, a private investment firm that focuses on the technology, technology-enabled and related growth industries. He also serves as interim president and CEO of Avaya Inc., a leading telecommunications company co-owned by Silver Lake, and is expected to become chairman of the board of Avaya in January 2009 upon appointment of the new president and CEO. Mr. Giancarlo is a seasoned executive with more than 25 years of experience in the communications industry. Before joining Silver Lake in December 2007, Mr. Giancarlo spent 14 years with Cisco Systems, where he led the company’s product development, business development and other management activities. Among the variety of senior executive roles he held was executive vice president and chief development officer, responsible for all of the company’s business units and divisions, and president of Cisco-Linksys. Mr. Giancarlo joined Cisco when the company acquired Kalpana Inc., a pioneer in Ethernet switching. He was an early developer of both asynchronous transfer mode (ATM) and switched Ethernet technologies, and he holds multiple patents in ATM and voice technologies. Mr. Giancarlo founded four communications equipment companies and sold two of them to larger companies. In 2007, he was named to Network World’s list of the “Top 50 Most Powerful People in Networking” for the fourth year in a row. In addition to serving on Accenture’s board of directors, Mr. Giancarlo also serves on the board of Avaya and Netflix Inc. Mr. Giancarlo holds a bachelor’s degree in electrical engineering from Brown University, a master’s degree in electrical engineering from the University of California at Berkeley and an M.B.A. from Harvard University.