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The recent lay-offs at the $49-billion networking major Cisco’s home base that saw hundreds of permanent employees in the Customer Success Management organisation and the Cloud Platforms & Solutions Group being released before the Thanksgiving holiday, has had a ripple effect in India.
Some 50-100 permanent employees involved in Services Sales, Marketing, IT and Technology Services along with those who are part of Customer Success and Cloud Platforms & Solutions groups are likely to get the pink slips, Cisco insiders told BusinessLine .
The lay-offs are in line with the CEO Chuck Robbins’ vision to transition the networking behemoth from its legacy hardware business model to a cloud and subscription-based business model that will bring in recurring revenues for the company.
To lead this transition, Robbins hired Maria Martinez, as Cisco’s Chief Customer Experience Officer in April this year. Martinez headed Sales and Customer Success at Salesforce.com prior to joining Cisco.
On being asked to comment on the India lay-offs, Cisco, in a statement, said: “Over the last several years, we have been transforming Cisco to deliver even greater value to our customers. We continue to make decisions to ensure that our investments and resources are aligned with the strategic growth areas of the business.”
“The lay-offs have been labelled as NR (not required) positions or LR (limited restructuring) which is Cisco-speak for lay-offs. Employees who are being asked to leave have been given one month’s notice during which time they have been urged to re-apply to open job positions within the company. If they fail to qualify for the new positions, they will be given a 6-month severance package equivalent to 6 months of CTC,” said a senior executive from Cisco.
Another long-serving Cisco executive based in San Francisco said the lay-offs are a result of the merger of the ‘Advanced Technical Services’ team and the ‘Technical Services’ team into one entity called Customer Experience, which has made many positions redundant.
A former top executive from Cisco India said he has received many CVs of laid off employees at Cisco, who are now job-hunting.
A post on December 2 on Glassdoor from a Customer Success Manager at Cisco, who has been with the company for over 10 years, read: “Most recently, Cisco released the entire Customer Success Management organisation with hundreds of people without providing any ‘real’ opportunity to find a job internally. For months, it was promised by the Executive Management that there would be jobs to easily transition to as it would only be a “job reclassification” and not a lay-off. This was not true as everyone was released.”
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