Cisco to close shop for 4 days to save money
Networking giant Cisco Systems plans to shut down its offices for four days at the end of the year to help save money, according to a research note by UBS analyst Nikos Theodosopoulos.
The company plans to close its offices in the United States and Canada from December 29, 2008, until January 2, 2009. Cisco hopes the shutdown will help save $1 billion in operating expenses.
CEO John Chambers indicated during the company's quarterly conference call earlier this month that Cisco will need to reduce its operating expenses, as it faces a challenging economic environment. Cisco, which sells Internet gear to large corporate customers like banks, has been especially hit during the downturn, as many of its Wall Street customers drastically reduce spending.
During the last economic downturn, many technology companies shut down operations during the week between Christmas and New Year's Day as a way to save operating costs. But this is the first time that Cisco has taken such a step in more than a decade.
"Given the difficult macroeconomic conditions, we believe our cost control focus at this time is appropriate, while still providing our partners and customers with critical services over the holiday period," the company said on its blog explaining the shutdown.
Marguerite Reardon has been a CNET News reporter since 2004, covering cell phone services, broadband, citywide Wi-Fi, the Net neutrality debate, as well as the ongoing consolidation of the phone companies. E-mail Maggie. 
The worst thing about Cisco is that they nickle and dime you to death. I can buy the chassis from Foundry and get the power supply, management module, and switch fabric. All that is left are ports which are modular. That is it for a non-redundant system. The cisco chassis, is the metal frame and that is it. And not that much less than the Foundry chassis.
Meanwhile, I have to pay extra for IP4, IP6, QOS, IDS, etc, etc in Cisco while all that is built in to the Foundry solution (Big Iron).
Last summer pricing switches the best I could get from Cisco is about $150,000 for a modular system, or $30,000 for an underfeatured non-modular system. The Big Iron system was a bit under $50,000 and slightly below the $150,000 switch and miles ahead of the $30,000.
Even the Cisco service plan was 3x as much. Cisco lock-in is pretty heinous also.
Yeah, their equipment is good but no better than Foundry, Allied Telesyn, etc.
They simply need to stop the price gouging.Yeah, their profits will drop, but not as much as more and more companies and organizations move away from Cisco.
This is part of them cutting costs, this single act won't result in a savings of $1 billion - i think that should be re-worded :S
Cisco on the other had with close to $30 billion in liquidity, will be around for a while.
- by SHADuck November 25, 2008 3:35 PM PST
- this downturn is serious!
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(7 Comments)the last time they had excess capacity, cisco had the workers do community service for 30% of pay