Cisco CTO Padmasree Warrior will be taking on the responsibilities of the company’s chief strategy officer, the company announced in a blog post Tuesday. She is taking over the role from Ned Hooper, who is leaving the networking company to form an investment company Cisco is planning to partner with.

“Ned has been working on his plan with us over a number of months, and we look forward to partnering with him in his new endeavor,” the blog post, signed by Cisco CEO John Chambers and COO Gary Moore, read.

As chief strategy officer, Hooper led the company’s acquisition activity, overseeing several major recent deals that served as entries into new markets for Cisco. These included internet-security company IronPort, web-conferencing company WebEx and the data-protection firm Tanberg, among others.

Warrior will retain her responsibilities as CTO, while the team that has been reporting to Hooper will now report to her. Here new responsibilities include identifying major customer and industry transitions and finding ways for Cisco to use them to its advantage.

In her four years as CTO, Warrior has already had a major part to play in Cisco’s strategic development, having built the company’s strategy and execution in architectures, cloud and overall technology-strategy framework.

Hooper has been with Cisco for 13 years – three of them as CSO. In his last role, he pioneered the company’s model for large-scale mergers and acquisitions in addition to overseeing its US$2bn investment portfolio.

Cisco’s most recent major investment in a non-Cisco entity was Insiemi, a startup developing a new type of data center network switch. Creation of the company was reported by The New York Times, which characterized it as a Cisco “spin-in”.

A spin-in is when a larger company invests in an innovative startup with the intention of buying it later.

Cisco also announced the appointment of Pankaj Patel to lead its engineering organization. Patel has until now been leading the company’s unit selling to service providers.