Cisco Vietnam's CEO shares her journey in the rapidly changing business world

Luong Thi Le Thuy, CEO of Cisco Vietnam, Laos, and Cambodia

You graduated with a degree in education, but then changed direction to the technology field. What fate brought you to this industry?

After graduation, I had the opportunity to work at a multinational company and was fortunate to be one of the first people in Vietnam to experience the Internet and the miracles it brings to our world that previously seemed limited to fairy tales. From being fascinated, I became passionate about discovering this magical thing. I was so lucky when my love for technology met with Cisco, a tech giant.

I feel even a greater pride knowing that Cisco was the company that brought the first router to Vietnam, helping our country build the backbone of its Internet system. This made a vital contribution to the development of the nation's IT industry, and improved the lives of nearly 100 million Vietnamese people.

Would you mind telling us about your personal success and Cisco's achievements so far?

Cisco really helped me develop and become the most beautiful and successful version of myself.

In 2015, I was assigned to run Cisco Vietnam. At that time, not many people believed that Cisco Vietnam would have a female CEO because this was unprecedented in the region, and especially here. I was honoured to become the first female CEO in Vietnam.

I always share my profound gratitude and happiness with everyone, thanks to the extraordinary opportunities extended to me by Cisco's leadership. Above all, it is the wholehearted support of our team that has helped Cisco Vietnam grow as strong and resilient as it is today.

We are proud to have won the Great Place to Work First Prize for two consecutive years from the international organisation GPTW.

Recently, we also successfully brought Cisco’s Country Digital Acceleration to Vietnam – a global investment fund with the goal of providing the most advanced technological inventions and experience from the world's leading experts to help the Vietnamese government and the country's businesses accelerate the digital transformation quickly.

What led to Cisco's success in creating great working environments?

At the recent Cisco Impact, a prominent global event held in Las Vegas, we felt an immense sense of pride when Cisco Vietnam was announced as the two-time consecutive winner of the Best Place to Work award in the Vietnamese market. The ceremony was held in front of an audience representing hundreds of countries around the world.

I received a similar question from numerous people, “Is it because Cisco is a tech giant that has supportive policies for its employees?”

While this holds much truth, it's not the sole key to our success. The true secret recipe lies in the environment and Conscious Culture that we've collectively cultivated over the years, which has transformed Cisco into a dream workplace with distinct attributes.

Cisco is people-centric. We promote the value of all employees, accept the diversity among them, and create an inclusive environment. Every staff member feels respected, cared for, free to be creative, and is provided with the opportunity to develop into the best version of themselves.

How do you see the development of the country's tech industry?

Vietnam’s digital economy has experienced significant growth over the past decade, and this will continue into the future. As businesses realise that what can be delivered digitally must be delivered digitally, they will continue to focus on five key transformation themes, including their move to cloud strategy, the transformation of their infrastructure, the delivery of seamless AI-driven user experiences, the tech to power the future of work, and security against cyber threats.

Over the course of nearly 25 years of operation and growth in the Vietnamese market, Cisco has been honoured to receive many awards and certificates of merit from the government for the important contributions it has made to the development of the IT industry here.

We are delighted and proud to see the rapid development of Vietnam's IT industry. The nation has been named on the world IT map, being one of the strongest countries in terms of IT in the region.

Cisco remains unwavering in its commitment to being a steadfast partner on this digital transformation journey, propelling Vietnam to new heights and contributing to the realisation of the government's visionary objectives.

What is the unique value that Cisco brings to its customers and partners in this highly competitive market?

Our differentiation is built on a record of proven innovation, the trust of our customers, and unmatched global reach. Over the last four decades, the Cisco brand has become synonymous with delivering customer and partner outcomes on a massive scale. We are a global leader in networking and a top-three security vendor by revenue. We continue to deliver integrated capabilities across our portfolio, including leveraging AI to provide business and data-driven insights.

Our reliability, transparency, and accountability have made us a trusted partner. For example, we design, build, operate, and act with security, data protection, and privacy at our foundation. We are also working to minimise our impact on the environment, with our goal of meeting net-zero emissions across our value chain by 2040.

Our global reach is unparalleled thanks to our broad customer base and network of partners. We are not just a vendor; we are a strategic partner to our customers. Our global ecosystem helps us bring a diverse set of capabilities and differentiated offerings to Cisco customers.

Could you shed some light on Cisco's upcoming plans?

Our biggest ambition is to continue harnessing public-private partnerships to bring our innovations and expertise to Vietnamese organisations, helping them accelerate their digital transformation journeys. We do this in several ways.

As a company, we continue to accelerate our transformation to a software-as-a-service model. We are radically simplifying how our technology is delivered, managed, and optimised with our platform approach that focuses on delivering key business outcomes for our customers.

AI isn’t new to us. We have used it extensively across our portfolio to analyse and classify data, enabling many customer outcomes including automation, noise reduction with our collaboration platform Webex, and security vulnerability assessments. We continue to innovate with AI and ML, as we believe that it will allow businesses to reap great advantages.

Having built the core infrastructure of the internet, our legacy in networking puts us in the best position to become one of the most trusted security providers. We continue to double down on our ambitions to be among the dominant platform players in terms of security.

Cisco released the report Employees Are Ready for Hybrid Work, Are You? Hybrid working has improved total employee well-being, work-life balance, and performance in Vietnam, according to a new global Cisco study.

Cisco Vietnam promotes diversity and inclusion in tech field On the occasion of International Women’s Day, managing director of Cisco Vietnam, Laos, and Cambodia Luong Thi Le Thuy shared her thoughts with VIR's Thanh Van about the role of women in the tech industry.

Cisco innovates towards AI security cloud Cisco, a networking and security enterprise, is delivering on its promise of the AI-driven Cisco Security Cloud to simplify cybersecurity and empower people to do their best work from anywhere, regardless of increasingly sophisticated threats.