Al Palladin – at present: Legal Director, Head of global Brand Protection, Cisco Systems, Inc. Honored to be working with an outstanding squad of crime-fighters, revenue and margin guardians, and preventers of malicious activity, protecting the interests of Cisco, and those of legitimate Channel Partners and Customers. The organization is geographically diverse by design, spread among many countries on four continents. It is comprised of investigative teams aligned to Cisco’s sales regions (the Americas, EMEA and APAC) that support sales and channels + engineering team responsible for developing and implementing anti-counterfeiting technology and fielding authenticity requests from around the world + business controls and data intelligence team that proactively monitors platforms for threats and trends + fraud and loss prevention = protecting Cisco's IP in hardware and software.

Past: led a team that evolved Cisco's strategic approach to Entitlement (the granting, transfer and activation of Use Rights), developing new opportunities through IT Asset Management and License Compliance. While at Microsoft: Al was the first manager of the global Anti-Piracy program for Worldwide Operations. He created and led a team responsible for the R&D and implementation of new anti-counterfeiting features for Microsoft’s products. These innovations have shipped in billions of copies and have helped the company protect hundreds of millions of dollars’ worth of sales. Al later took on a global strategy and policy role for License Compliance; he introduced a new approach to license compliance (via Software Asset Management) & certifiable partner program competency, which currently drives more than $4B annually.