International mapping company HERE has announced that Edzard Overbeek has been appointed chief executive officer from today, 1 March.

Edzard was previously Strategic Advisor at networking giant Cisco, a company at which he has held several senior executive roles for the last 16 years. Most recently, he was responsible for the Global Services organization with over $12 billion in revenues and 15,000 employees. Before that he served as President of Cisco’s Asia Pacific, Japan and Greater China region, overseeing strategy and execution across all customer segments and strategic partner engagement. Prior to Cisco, he held leadership positions in companies including Fujitsu and Siemens.

Overbeek announced that HERE has a massive installed base in the automotive industry, a strong market position among impressive competitors, and technology leadership.

“The HERE location cloud is poised to be at the heart of new kinds of services that will genuinely change people’s lives – everything from autonomous cars and smart cities to digitising enterprises, ” he said.

He added that he is especially excited to be joining HERE as it operates as an independent entity backed by the consortium of shareholders consisting of AUDI AG, BMW Group and Daimler AG.

Edzard has a long-standing passion for maps and says, “the challenge is to understand how the maps of the future will look.”