Cisco Lays Off Hundreds to Focus on Strategic Areas

Written by Lynn Haber
November 7, 2018

Cisco is trimming hundreds of employees, laying off some workers and reassigning others, in an effort to best align investment with strategic growth areas.

Cisco isn’t saying much about a report from the U.K.’s Register about hundreds of job cuts worldwide, but the heaviest hit is reportedly to its customer experience (CX) team. The vendor did admit it’s making decisions about investments and resources in strategic growth areas of its business.

In the big scheme of things, that figure is a pittance of its employee base of more than 72,000, worldwide, and the vendor has slashed thousands of jobs in the not too distant past. That said, a job loss is anything but a feel-good moment to those in the line of fire. The Register report said another 10 percent of the job cuts are in the Cloud Platforms and Solutions group. The Silicon Valley Journal reported hundreds of cuts at the company’s San Jose, California, headquarters alone.

“Over the last several years, we have been transforming Cisco to deliver even greater value to our customers,” reads a company statement. “We continue to make decisions to ensure that our investments and resources are aligned with strategic growth areas of the business.”

Some of the affected Cisco employees might be offered jobs in different roles within the company, as Cisco currently has more than 3,800 open internal/external job requisitions globally, Channel Partners was told.

In another Silicon Valley Business Journal article, published on Oct. 26, it was reported that the company was creating a unified CX model as part of a strategy called CX Theatre Blueprint.

There’s some irony in Cisco trimming its CX team – the vendor wouldn’t say how many employees are on that team – but the customer experience has been top of mind for everyone in business, including the IT industry, for several years running.

Tiffani Bova, global customer growth and innovation evangelist at Salesforce, and author of “Growth IQ: Get Smarter About the Choices That Will Make or Break Your Business,” has been telling audiences for years that the customer experience trumps all.

Cisco’s fourth-quarter revenue was up 6 percent, or $12.8 billion, year over year. Revenue in fiscal year 2018 was $49.3 billion, accounting for a 3 percent year-over-year increase.