Cisco to trim workforce by hundreds of jobs

Cisco is cutting back its workforce with a new round of layoffs, according to published reports.

U.K.-based The Register reported that between 200 and 300 employees on Cisco's Customer Experience team lost their jobs on Monday. The Silicon Valley Business Journal reported that Cisco will trim 405 employees from its San Jose, California, headquarters and 57 employees that are based in Milpitas, California.

Cisco confirmed that it was shedding some employees, but declined to say how many and from what areas of Cisco's business. According to a Bloomberg profile of Cisco, it has over 74,000 employees.

“Over the last several years, we have been transforming Cisco to deliver even greater value to our customers," Cisco said in a statement. "We continue to make decisions to ensure that our investments and resources are aligned with strategic growth areas of the business.”

Cisco currently has 3,800 job openings globally, which people affected by the job cuts can apply for to see if they have the right skill sets for new jobs at Cisco.

Over the past few years, Cisco has been moving away from being a traditional hardware company that just sells routers, switches and set-top boxes.

In May, Cisco announced it was selling off its video software assets to private equity firm Permira. Six years ago, Cisco paid Permira about $5 billion to buy NDS Group. Cisco sold those NDS assets back to Permira for around $1 billion.

In 2015, Cisco sold its set-top box division, which it had acquired when it bought Atlanta-based  Scientific Atlanta, to Technicolor for $600 million.

Cisco is now focused on software subscription licensing models, but those revenues are works in progress.

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An example of Cisco's new focus is its cloud-native broadband router, which is called the cnBR. The new router marked Cisco's move toward a containerized, software version of cable's traditional CCAP hardware. At SCTE-Cable-Tec Expo last month, Cisco announced that the new router had been deployed by Midco in South Dakota.

Aside of the rank and file layoffs, Cisco has seen an exodus of several high-level executives this year. This past summer, Yvette Kanouff left her position as senior vice president and general manager of Cisco's service provider business, while Hilton Romanski moved on from his job in September as Cisco's senior vice president and chief strategy officer.

Back in May, Rowan Trollope, senior vice president and general manager of Cisco's application group, left the company to become the CEO of cloud startup Five9.