Latest Cisco Layoffs A Result Of Tech Giant’s Plan To ‘Rebalance’ Investments

Ahead of the end of the tech giant’s fiscal 2023, Cisco has issued more layoff notices to employees as part of its effort to ‘rebalance’ its investment priorities, the company tells CRN. Reports from Cisco employees say the layoffs span several business units, including collaboration, security and data center.

Cisco Systems reportedly began cutting jobs across some of its biggest business segments this week, according to a flurry of posts on TheLayoff.com and Blind, a tech career-focused message board.

The number of employees being let go is unclear and the layoffs began Monday, Blind said in an email to CRN, citing reports from verified former and current Cisco employees.

Cisco in November said that it would lay off approximately 4,000 employees, or about 5 percent of its workforce, and reduce some of its real estate in an effort to right-size some of its business units, including the collaboration segment. The tech giant told CRN that the latest layoff notifications are part of the November rebalancing effort.

“As we announced then, this is not about cost savings as we have roughly the same number of employees as we did before the process began. This rebalancing is about prioritizing investments in our transformation to meet and exceed our customers’ expectations in the changing technology landscape. We will continue to do everything we can to help place affected employees in open roles and offer extensive support including generous severance packages,” a Cisco spokesperson told CRN in an email.

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Cuts Hit Across Business Segments

The reported job cuts are across a variety of business segments, including collaboration; security; data center services and solutions; servers, or the company’s Unified Computing System (UCS) division; and Cisco’s Application Centric Infrastructure (ACI) group, Blind told CRN.

Cisco, for its part, did not confirm to CRN which business units were being impacted..

Cisco’s last round of layoffs occured in January when the company revealed that it was cutting 673 jobs in the San Francisco Bay Area as part of its plan to maximize cost savings announced in 2022. The company at the time eliminated 371 jobs at its San Jose location, 222 jobs in Milpitas and 80 in San Francisco, with the majority of the layoffs impacting software engineers, technical engineers, hardware engineers, product managers and supervisors, according to Worker Adjustment and Retraining Notifications filed with the state of California in January.

Cisco is expected to report its full fiscal year 2023 earnings on Aug. 16.