Cisco layoffs hit California workers

Cisco’s rolling layoffs this year have been taking a toll on many of its employees, and workers in California are being hit particularly hard.

According to documents filed under the state’s Worker Adjustment and Retraining Notification (WARN) system, which mandates a 60-day notification of pending large-scale layoffs, 842 employees impacted by the vendor’s current restructuring plan will come from the San Jose-San Francisco area. Specifically, Cisco employee reductions have taken 563 jobs in San Jose, 145 in Milpitas and 134 in San Francisco, according to the WARN figures.

There is also speculation – not confirmed by Cisco – that some of its headquarters buildings will be closed or change functions and a number of workers will be relocated to other facilities around the state. A posting on the TheLayoff claims that Cisco is closing a number of buildings in San Jose, including buildings that house its executive briefing centers, and another poster reports that non-engineering personnel will be relocated to a Splunk office in San Jose’s Santana Row complex. (Network World sister publication Computerwoche in Germany reported on these claims.)

The latter would come as no surprise to some industry watchers. Since Cisco closed its $28 billion acquisition of Splunk in May, it has been laser-focused on melding the two companies’ security, observability and AI portfolios, so consolidating employees in a few core facilities would make sense.

Effectively integrating the security and observability capabilities of the two vendors will ultimately determine the success or failure of the acquisition, experts told Network World at Cisco’s customer event this past summer. (Read more Cisco news and insights)

Cisco’s 2024 layoff timeline

In August of this year, Cisco said it would slice 7% of its global workface and reconfigure its networking, security and collaboration business units as part of a restructuring that will result in a $1 billion pre-tax charge to earnings. This round of layoffs, which is in progress, will impact about 6,000 jobs.

Six months earlier, in February, Cisco announced 4,200 job cuts in a move that cost the company an estimated $800 million in pre-tax charges.

Cisco is trying to move more quickly into three core areas – AI networking, security and collaboration – and wants to use the current restructuring to pump more resources into those growth areas, said CEO Chuck Robbins during the company’s fiscal fourth-quarter financial call. 

At part of the restructuring, Cisco is combining its networking, security and collaboration teams into one group led by Jeetu Patel, Cisco’s executive vice president and chief product officer.