Cisco guillotines 50 remote operations services staff in Austin, Texas

The Cisco Remote Operations Services (ROS) unit appears to be floundering, especially after guillotining 50 jobs this week in Austin, Texas.

Cisco ROS was created from the $128 million cash acquisition in 2004 of NetSolve - a remote network monitoring firm.

Interesting that with nearly 4 years of ownership under Cisco's belt, the unit will now have 42 less employees in Austin than at the time of its acquisition in 2004.

Found this customer complaint about Cisco ROS on the Internet:

This week we received an email from Cisco ROS informing us that their network had been infected with a worm on June 24, 2006.

Since they manage many of our WAN devices, they have a direct connection to our enterprise.

The message informed us of the infection, that it was contained and eradicated, but that we should ensure our anti-virus applications were up to date.

It would be an understatement to say that we're concerned. After all, it only took them three months to notify us of the issue.

When we asked our account team why we weren't informed of this issue immediately upon discovery, they told us that they were trying to determine the best way to communicate the problem.

This was further complicated by a lack of a customer notification process for dealing with malware challenges.

Is the Cisco ROS headcount reduction a bellwether of things to come at Cisco?

http://www.BradReese.Com