5 Companies That Had A Rough Week

The Week Ending July 15

Topping this week's roundup of companies that had a rough week was Avnet, following the sudden resignation of its CEO, as the company's board looks for ways to jump-start the distributor's growth.

Also making the list were Comcast and its thousands of Business Voice phone customers, who suffered through a widespread service outage this week; the thousands of employees at Seagate Technology who face the prospect of being laid off in a massive restructuring; Cisco, which scrambled to patch a serious vulnerability in its router operating system; and Google, which was left out in the cold after AWS acquired a development tool company Google had partnered with.

Not everyone in the IT industry was having a rough go of it this week. For a rundown of companies that made smart decisions, executed savvy strategic moves – or just had good luck – check out this week's Five Companies That Came To Win roundup.

Avnet CEO Suddenly Steps Down, Former Lenovo CEO Steps In On Interim Basis

Avnet CEO Rick Hamada (pictured) unexpectedly stepped down Monday after five years on the job when the distributor's board decided a "change in leadership was needed" to accelerate the company's growth, "drive a greater sense of urgency" and "enhance [the company's] focus on execution."

Former Lenovo CEO Bill Amelio was named interim CEO.

Changes in top leadership are sometimes necessary and, in the long run, can be a positive thing for businesses. And that may be the case with Avnet, which recently reported an 8 percent decline in sales for its fiscal third quarter and income growth of less than 2 percent. It seems a change in the corner office was in order.

But in the short term, sudden board-driven changes in the executive office create turbulence and uncertainty for all the company's stakeholders – never a good thing for any business in the fast-moving IT industry. The fact that such a change was needed at Avnet at all was enough to land the company on our Rough Week list.

Comcast Phone Service Outage Hits Small Businesses

It was a tough week for Comcast and nearly 1 million of its small-business customers across the country following a widespread outage of the Comcast Business Voice phone service earlier this week.

A power failure at a Comcast data center brought down phone service for some 950,000 business customers in dozens of cities Tuesday, according to multiple published reports, including on the Denver Post, Seattle Times and Nasdaq.com websites.

Small businesses took to social media to complain that they were unable to make outgoing or receive incoming calls. Even worse, some reported that callers got a recording saying the number was no longer in service – giving the impression a company had gone out of business.

The problem was reportedly corrected overnight Tuesday with service restored by Wednesday morning.

Seagate To Cut 6,500 Jobs In Restructuring

It was a bad week to be a Seagate employee. This week, the disk drive manufacturer said it would cut 6,500 jobs, or about 14 percent of its workforce, in a broad restructuring effort, according to published reports by Bloomberg and the Los Angeles Times.

Seagate, along with other suppliers of disk drives and components used in PCs, have been hit hard by the slowdown in the PC market. Seagate had announced plans earlier this year to cut its workforce by about 3 percent, but this week's news takes those plans far beyond that number.

The employee cuts are expected to hit hardest in Seagate's manufacturing operations in Asia, but employees in the company's operations in the Americas, Europe, Africa and the Middle East won't be spared.

Cisco Scrambles To Patch Router, Conferencing Software Vulnerabilities

Cisco developers hustled to develop patches for security vulnerabilities in several products – one that was rated a high criticality in the IOS XR software that runs the Cisco Network Convergence System (NCR) 6000 Series Routers.

That flaw, residing in the software's "management of system timer" resources, could allow an attacker to remotely crash a router and bring down an organization's network, according to a Cisco advisory. The company also issued a patch for a flaw, deemed to be of "medium severity," in the Cisco ASR 5000 Series.

The company also issued patches for vulnerabilities in the Cisco Meeting and WebEx Meetings servers.

Google Misses Out As AWS Acquires Cloud9

In January, Google published a blog post touting the fact that Cloud9's browser-based integrated development environment (IDE) supported the Google Cloud Platform, an alliance that made it easier for developers to build applications that ran on the Google system.

But this week, Amazon Web Services, a Google rival in the heated cloud computing services arena, acquired Cloud9 for an undisclosed sum, according to a Cloud9 blog post. The move is generally seen as making the AWS platform more attractive for building and deploying cloud applications.