Women Who Inspire Us
Hardware

Dixie Garr

Dixie Garr is vice president of customer success engineering at Cisco Systems, Inc., where she leads Cisco's efforts to continually understand its customers' experiences and drives changes throughout Cisco's engineering processes and business practices to meet the needs of Cisco customers worldwide. Garr leads teams responsible for world-class customer satisfaction, corporate quality leadership, serviceability design and product compliance.

Prior to joining Cisco, Garr applied her background in software engineering, marketing, and business development to technical and business leadership positions in six large corporations. As director of software engineering at Texas Instruments, Garr led a team of more than 800 software engineers to develop more than 100 real-time embedded systems. She was responsible for development and deployment, software quality engineering, configuration management and automation. Garr's 23 years of high tech experience spans commercial, industrial and defense segments.

Garr is the recipient of a patent for the Advanced Productivity Tool (APT), an object-oriented case tool for factory control. In 1997 she received national recognition as Black Engineer of the Year for Professional Achievement in Industry from the U.S. Black Engineer and Information Technology magazine and The Council of Engineering Deans of the Historically Black Colleges and Universities. She is also an alumna of Leadership America and Leadership Texas.

A motivational speaker, Garr has given a number of keynote speeches at high profile events, including Women of Color, Women in Technology International (WITI) and Supercomm on topics such as Leadership in the New World of Technology, Internet Trends and Technologies and Customer Listening Systems.