From 2009-2018, he was the Global President of Smart+Connected Communities at Cisco Systems, where he was one of the key leaders of Cisco’s Internet of Things (IOT) business through its incubation and growth within the company. As global president, he shepherded the Cisco Smart+Connected Communities business from a startup within Cisco to a billion-dollar business. Anil was also the deputy chief globalization officer and led Cisco’s globalization headquarters in Bangalore, India, and also served as chairman of Cisco India’s External Board.  

From 2002 to 2009, Anil held several global functional roles at IBM HQ, in Armonk, NY, ranging from global head of IBM brand strategy for managing IBM’s transition from a hardware brand to a business technology brand, to being the head of worldwide market intelligence, and to serving as the chief marketing and strategy officer for IBM’s $34B global hardware business.  He also served on IBM’s Strategy Team, which helped the company’s CEO set overall business and investment strategy.  Anil represented IBM on the Council on Competitiveness’ National Innovation Initiative, in 2004, as part of the taskforce on Innovation Markets. 

Before joining IBM, Anil was a successful tenured professor on the graduate faculty at Emory University’s Goizueta Business School in Atlanta, Georgia, and a senior advisor and consultant to a number of global blue-chip consumer and industrial companies on market innovation and transformation.  Anil holds a PhD in marketing strategy and in multivariate statistics.  Anil’s doctoral dissertation was funded by, and conducted at, the Strategic Planning Council in Cambridge, MA—an international research and consulting think tank established by GE and the Harvard Business School—on whose executive council Anil later served.  Anil was also a Sony Business Fellow with Sony Corporation from 1993-1996.  

Anil’s research has been published in a range of top academic and practitioner-oriented journals including Journal of Marketing, Journal of Marketing Research, Journal of the Academy of Marketing Science, Journal of Business Research, Journal of Advertising, Journal of Product Innovation Management, Long Range Planning.  Anil is a recipient of the American Marketing Association’s AMA/Marketing Science Institute/H. Paul Root Award for academic research with the biggest impact on the practice of marketing. He was also awarded the Academy of Marketing Science’s Distinguished Practitioner award for his brand strategy work at IBM.  

Anil is on the board of directors for the Center for Global Health Innovation (CGHI) in Atlanta and the Chairman for The Office for Health Equity within CGHI.  He serves on the Advisory Board of the Center for Customer Insights at the Yale University School of Management, and on the board of directors for the Antique Phonograph Society.  He is a faculty affiliate and industry advisor at MIT’s Senseable City Lab.

He has served on the boards of Orbia, Inc, a publicly trading company in the infrastructure and specialty chemical space, and Netafim, Inc, an Israeli irrigation technology company. He has served on the board of Coca-Cola Company’s Technology Incubator, Fizzion, on Citibank India’s board of advisors, and as a trustee of The New Cities Foundation. He is an active investor and an advisor to several B2B-focused digital platform startups.

Anil is married, the proud father of two daughters. He collects 19th century Baluchi carpets and Edison cylinder phonographs and records from 1890s-1910s.