Cisco Systems is cutting nearly 500 jobs in San Jose and Milpitas, marking the second round of layoffs to hit the networking hardware maker’s local offices in the past 12 months.
The San Jose company — which does millions of dollars in business annually with the state — said in a July 30 filing with the state’s Employment Development Department that it would cut 397 jobs at its corporate headquarters, as well as 91 jobs in Milpitas.
Engineering took the brunt of the layoffs. In San Jose, the most common roles slashed were software engineers and engineering technical leaders, with some program managers in the mix.
The company — long known for hardware such as switches and routers — has shifted focus to software in recent years, leading it to trim thousands of jobs related to its hardware business.
Cisco said last November that it would eliminate nearly 500 workers in the South Bay, in addition to layoffs affecting around 700 local employees in 2017 and 940 the year before that.
“Over the last few years, we have been transforming Cisco and driving innovation to deliver even greater value to our customers and partners,” a company representative said in an email. “It’s important that we make decisions to continually ensure that our investments and resources are aligned with strategic growth areas of the business and customer demands.”
The spokeswoman said the company was working closely with employees to place them in other roles at Cisco.
The recent job cuts that had been announced last month are “permanent in nature,” Saidah Grayson Dill, Cisco’s director of legal services, told state government officials in a notice filed to comply with state and federal WARN Act requirements.
Cisco’s restructuring has required seismic changes in operations, products and personnel since CEO Chuck Robbins took over in 2015.
“We’re four years in and I’m really proud of what our teams have accomplished,” Robbins said in an earnings call Wednesday.
Cisco said it grew revenues of $13.43 billion in the fourth quarter of its 2019 fiscal year, which ended July 27. On Wednesday, shares of the company tumbled as much as 7 percent in after-hours trading.
Cisco had more than 14,000 employees in the Peninsula and South Bay at the end of last year, putting its size behind only Apple and Google’s parent company, Alphabet, in the region, according to the Silicon Valley Business Journal. Cisco employs about 74,000 workers around the globe. More recently, Cisco has been adding employees in San Francisco through acquisitions such as Meraki, a Wi-Fi router maker, in November 2012; and AppDynamics, a cloud software company, in March 2017. It also recently moved a cloud collaboration division to the city. As a result, it is now one of the largest private employers in the city.
Cisco did not report any layoffs in San Francisco in the recent WARN Act notices.
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