According to Reuters, sources said that Cisco will make substantial layoffs, with a scale of 14,000 people, accounting for 20% of the total number of employees. This will be the largest layoff in Cisco's 32-year history.
As early as January of this year, Global Equities Research analyst Tripp Chaudh predicted that Cisco may lay off more than 10,000 people this year. Joe Du said that because more customers are turning to the cloud, Cisco is entering the cloud market relatively late, and many staff responsible for back-office processes are no longer needed.
 Late business transformationThe reason for Cisco’s layoffs is not difficult to judge. Due to the need for business transformation, the company is gradually abandoning its old business.
As we all know, Cisco has always been a leader in the network equipment industry. But now the network equipment market is no longer the world of hardware, evolved into the world of cloud computing and cheap equipment with software solutions. The rise of cloud service services from vendors such as Google and Amazon has had a very large impact on Cisco.
Previously, Cisco's services were required to run on the same brand of hardware and complete systems, and now they are splitting different services, no longer binding hardware and software licenses, and thus transforming the hardware companies into software companies. Since Chuck Robbins became Cisco CEO, he has been committed to the launch of software-based network, security and management products, and he has invested more in data analysis software and data center cloud tool products to offset telecom operators and corporate expenses. Decrease the impact on its network gateways and routers' main business.
Cisco tried to transition early, but took a lot of detours.
Chambers once suggested that Cisco's new goal is to "transform from the world's largest network company to the world's largest IT company," from the equipment provider to a comprehensive solution provider , but the solution is still based on hardware devices to provide Did not realize the rise of software and applications. After Chambers realized this, he proposed to transform Cisco from a network equipment (router and switch-based) manufacturer to a designer and seller of software and services, but at this time Amazon, Microsoft, and Google are already far away. Ran ahead.
The biggest competitor Huawei, as early as the end of 2010 Renfei put forward "the cloud platform to go beyond Cisco in the not too long time, in the cloud business to catch up with Google," the cloud service in the company's strategic position. After that, Ren Zhengfei divided the company's business into operators, companies, terminals, and other four major segments.
 Chinese business frustratedIn the fourth quarter of July 26th, Cisco China’s revenue fell by 23% year-on-year . Several senior Cisco executives in China have been asked to leave this year , including China President Hahn Tu and Vice President of Greater China Zhang Sihua (Fredy). Cheung) etc. Cisco 's poor sales performance in China was partly due to Snowden’s 2013 disclosure of NSA’s deployment of surveillance tools in some US technology products sold overseas. The Chinese government hopes to use domestic technology products; on the other hand, Huawei’s Rise.
Back in the early days, there were a total of 60 Cisco products on the list of China's central government procurement centers in 2012, and that figure dropped to zero in the 2014 purchase list.
The layoffs are likely to affect a large number of employees in Cisco China.
 Investment mergers and acquisitions Any large-scale enterprise only involves business transformation, certainly can not avoid investment and acquisitions to expand new product lines, Cisco's investment in this area is particularly generous.
cloud service
Cisco has said that they will invest a lot of money in the cloud service area to build a data center to help the new Cisco Cloud Services project run. As early as 2012, Cisco acquired Meraki, a cloud computing network company, for US$1.2 billion. In May 2015, Cisco acquired Tropo to complement PaaS services in the collaboration field. In March of this year, Cisco acquired cloud search technology start-up company Synata, and its technology will be Integrated into Cisco's cloud-based collaboration service Cisco Spark.
During the same period, Cisco acquired CliQr, a hybrid cloud management solution provider, for $260 million and incorporated it into the Cisco Insieme division. The CloudCenter hybrid cloud management platform developed by CliQr can provide full life cycle management of multiple applications, users, and cloud, facilitating user management of workload migration across physical, virtual, and cloud environments. At the hybrid cloud solution level, Cisco has released Cisco Cloudcloud, a hybrid cloud software innovation, and has established partnerships with 35 independent software vendors (ISVs).
Business collaboration
In November 2015, Cisco acquired Acano, a video conferencing collaboration system, for $700 million.
In fact, Cisco has already begun the layout of collaborative business market, has $ 3.3 billion acquisition of Norwegian video conferencing company Tandberg ASA, and invested $ 3.2 billion acquisition of Web conferencing services company WebEx Communications.
cyber security
Cisco has repeatedly emphasized the gold-coded network security business.
In June of this year, Cisco acquired cloud security company CloudLock to strengthen the security technology in the cloud. Previously, Cisco purchased Lancope, a network security company, for $453 million; Sourcefire, a network security company, for $2.7 billion; and OpenDNS for $635 million. There are also smaller security companies such as ThreatGrid, Portcullis, and Neohapsis.
Internet of Things
In February, Cisco received Jasper, a shopping networking startup, for $1.4 billion in cash and stocks. Jasper's business features are connecting devices such as automobiles, jet engines, and pacemakers to the Internet, while also creating a software platform to help monitor these devices online.
 Product positioning changesCisco’s current strategy is to focus its main products on high-end and mid-to-high-end markets. As low-end product profits become thinner and its share is eaten up by competitors, Cisco gradually abandons the existing low-end product lines. These low-end products Most of the lines are made up of old employees.
 New recruits far outnumbered layoffsThe outside world often pays more attention to the number of layoffs, and does not care about the number of new employees. Lei Feng network (search "Lei Feng network" public concern) access to data shows that in the past few years, Cisco cumulative layoffs of more than 20,000 people, poor performance of the departments and individuals have been eliminated, but the total number of Cisco in the same period Thousands of people have been added, and these data have confirmed that Cisco recruits more new recruits than ever, and the new product line is expanding faster than ever.
In general, Cisco is transforming from a traditional hardware business to a software-centric enterprise organization. Although Cisco has actively transformed in recent years and has made large-scale investment and acquisitions to open the software business market, the current market environment is Cisco obviously has missed the best opportunity for transformation. Therefore, in order to speed up the pace of catching up with Google, Amazon and other companies, Cisco has to speed up the transition of new and old businesses, so it is not surprising that there is a large-scale mass layoff.
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