Cisco Systems is a company focused on the manufacture, sale and maintenance of telecommunications equipment such as routers, hubs, switches, but also focus on software through the implementation of firewalls, VPN services ... but its main business is related to the management of networks and the security that surrounds them. The Califronia-based company announced a few days ago the layoff of 5.500 employees to close the hardware division and focus solely on software. The latest financial results have shown us how the hardware division has returned to flat numbers, while the software division has grown 20% compared to the previous year.
The company has decided to make that decision despite having achieved a profit of almost 11.000 million. Those 5.500 layoffs are in addition to the 6.000 employees that Cisco cut in 2014 and the 4.000 it announced last year to try to adapt to new market needs. The main reason for the dismissal is to reduce costs and invest in the cloud services that the company is launching and with which wants to compete with the giant Amazon and Google, current kings of the market in terms of cloud storage for companies.
Cisco CEO Chuck Robbins proposed since his arrival as CEO of the company last year, change the direction that the company has taken in recent yearsshifting away from hardware manufacturing to focus on cloud services and software. Since the new CEO has taken control of Cisco, the firm has bought fifteen companies, many of them related to cloud services, which gives us to understand what the company's priorities are in the coming years.