Cisco Systems Inc. announced two new executive hires on Monday as John Chambers finally stepped down from his role as company CEO, to be replaced by Chuck Robbins.

The company has pulled off something of a coup with the hiring of venture capital specialist Zorawar Biri Singh as its new CTO for platforms and solutions, Bloomberg reported. Singh is an instant replacement for CTO and chief strategy officer Padmasaree Warrior, who bowed out of the company along with a host of other staff, including chief globalisation officer Wim Elfrink, Edzard Overbeek, the senior vice president of services, and presidents Rob Lloyd and Gary Moore.

Singh joins Cisco’s executive leadership team, said Robbins in a statement on Monday. As part of his new role, he’ll be tasked with driving thought leadership for the company’s long-term technology roadmap, and its platforms and architectures strategy. Singh will “set the foundation” for the company’s long-term investments, Cisco said on Monday.

The other notable hire is Kevin Bandy, who joins as the firm’s new Chief Digital Officer and will also lead the company’s Internet of Things business. Bandy is a former Salesforce.com executive who was most recently a management consultant for Rhea Springs LLC

However it’s Singh, with his 24-years of experience in the tech world, most recently at Khosla Ventures, who is by far the bigger catch. Before joining Khosla, Singh held the position of senior vice president and general manager for Hewlett-Packard’s cloud business. At HP he was tasked with creating its OpenStack cloud technology and business from nothing, having joined that firm under Leo Apotheker’s short-lived stewardship.

Previous to that, Singh served as Vice President for Cloud Computing at IBM for three years, where he led the firm’s infrastructure, platform and software-as-a-service strategies. Singh joined IBM in 2008 as a result of Big Blue’s acquisition of Encentuate Inc., where he held the roles of CEO and President.

During his tenure at HP, Singh dropped by theCUBE at the HP Discovery event in 2012, where he discussed HP’s process for getting enterprise workloads into the cloud, as well as its committment to the OpenStack project.

Singh and Robbins join Cisco at a critical time in the networking giant’s history. Having once been ranked as the most valuable company in the world, Cisco is facing a huge challenge to its core business from the rise of cloud computing. With more companies using Amazon Web Services, Microsoft Azure and other cloud services, there’s a reduced need for Cisco’s data center networking gear. With most analysts saying the cloud is likely to become the norm for most enterprises in future, a big chunk of Cisco’s business is at stake.

Cisco also faces a second major threat in the form of software-defined networking (SDN). The principal of SDN is that companies can buy cheaper commodity servers than Cisco’s expensive hardware and install customized software in them to get the same features.

But Chambers said in the company’s last earnings call that: “All this garbage about new players coming in, and software coming in, and white label killing our approach was entirely wrong,” noting that the growth of SDN has so far not affected Cisco’s bottom line.

That might be the case for now, but Glenn O’Donnell , an analyst at Forrester Research Inc., recently told Fortune that even though Cisco’s bottom line hasn’t been affected yet, “eventually that will start declining” as SDN technologies become more popular.