IBM, Nokia, Cisco Among Vendors That Slashed Jobs in 2020

The past year has been tough on most people, and especially so for those that lost their jobs in 2020. What started out looking like a prosperous year for the SDN and cloud market quickly turned as the COVID-19 pandemic expanded its reach across the world. The past year has been tough on most people, and especially so for those that lost their jobs in 2020. What started out looking like a prosperous year for the SDN and cloud market quickly turned as the COVID-19 pandemic expanded its reach across the world. While the SDN and cloud ecosystems might have weathered the storm better than some, it still left a devastating wake as tens of thousands of workers lost their jobs or were required to take unpaid leave. Here are some of the biggest cuts and moves announced in 2020. IBM had a busy 2020, as it welcomed in a new leader that was focused on re-architecting the hardware and increasingly software giant vendor. The vendor announced in October plans to ditch its legacy Managed Infrastructure Services and Global Technology Services business units into a separate company in a bid to allow the company to be “laser-focused” on the hybrid cloud market. That was followed shortly by plans to cut around 10,000 jobs in Europe. Those cuts represent around 20% of IBM’s staff on the continent and will impact employees in the United Kingdom, Germany, Poland, Slovakia, Italy, and Belgium, according to reports. Staying in Europe, Nokia said it was cutting 1,233 jobs in France, largely impacting research and development positions at its Alcatel-Lucent subsidiary. Nokia has been slashing jobs amid a global cost savings program originally announced in late 2018. “Nokia is reinforcing its efforts and has earlier launched a global evaluation of its [research and development] operation that has led to significant adjustments globally,” a company spokesperson said in a statement. The Finnish vendor, which is trying to cut $556 million in costs by the end of 2020, announced plans to cut about 180 jobs in its home country at the beginning of the year and hinted at more to come. Cisco recently confirmed that it had laid off about 3,500 employees since the start of the COVID-19 pandemic despite CEO Chuck Robbins’ pledge in April to not cut any jobs because of the pandemic. In October, Cisco reportedly began laying off about 9% of its workforce, or about 7,100 employees. About a month later, on the company’s first-quarter fiscal 2021 earnings call with investors, Robbins didn’t mention layoffs, nor was he asked about the job cuts. However, anonymous Cisco employees expressed their displeasure on TheLayoff.com. One said the company also cut employee bonuses in half this year. “Bonus cut in half. Large layoffs. Earnings report was outstanding. OK,” another anonymous employee posted. Nutanix required about 26% of its global workforce to take two, one-week long unpaid furloughs as the tech company attempted to weather the COVID-19 economy. This included almost 1,500 San Francisco Bay Area employees. “Furloughed employees will maintain their benefits and employment status with Nutanix throughout the week-long furlough periods,” a spokesperson told SDxCentral. “We have carefully scripted these furloughs to minimize the impact on our customers, with all Nutanix services fully available during this time. Our philosophy as we navigate the COVID-19 pandemic is to do the ‘most good’ with the least amount of harm for all of our employees and these furloughs will help us achieve that.” Telecommunications industry trade association GSMA reported that it had cut around 200 jobs due to the cancellation of the various Mobile World Congress events it hosts around the world each year. The cuts impacted about 20% of the company’s workforce and came four months after the group canceled its flagship annual conference in Barcelona. “Due to the cancellation of MWC Barcelona 2020 and MWC Shanghai 2020, it has been necessary to examine our priorities and to make some difficult choices regarding how we work and where we invest. Regretfully these changes impact our staff in offices around the world,” a GSMA spokesperson wrote in an email to SDxCentral. Hitachi Vantara has cut several hundred jobs in Silicon Valley over the past year. The most recent, which were disclosed in the California Worker Adjustment and Retraining Notification (WARN) report, included 148 positions at its office in Santa Clara, California. Those cuts followed a filing earlier this year to cut 151 jobs at that location. The California WARN report also showed that VMware and Marvell Semiconductor slashed hundreds of jobs over the second half of the year. VMware filed plans to cut 148 jobs at its Palo Alto, California, offices that were set to be completed by mid-October. Marvell filed to cut 186 positions across three of its California offices. This included 172 positions in Santa Clara, and 14 in Irvine. Marvell announced in October plans to acquire rival chipmaker Inphi for roughly $10 billion in cash and stock options. While not specifically job cuts, Google earlier this year moved to slow down the pace of its hiring in light of the COVID-19 pandemic. According to an email from CEO Sundar Pichai, Google and its parent company Alphabet planned to “significantly slow down the pace of hiring” for the rest of the year and reduce spending on data centers, machines, and non-essential marketing and travel. “We are reevaluating the pace of our investment plans for the remainder of 2020,” Pichai told employees in a memo first reported by Bloomberg. “That starts with taking a more critical look at the pace of hiring for the rest of the year. For context, we hired 20,000 Googlers in 2019, and had been targeting a similar number for 2020.” Pichai didn’t specify any hiring numbers, but he said that the company will maintain “momentum in a small number of strategic areas.” The news was not all bad for jobs in 2020, as Alibaba Cloud and Amazon both announced plans to hire thousands of new employees to help grow their respective technology businesses. Alibaba Group said it would hire 5,000 people for its Cloud operations, which came just months after it announced plans to invest $28 billion in its cloud platform during the next three years. Alibaba said it will make the hires before the end of its financial calendar year, which ends on March 31, 2021. The company is recruiting IT professionals with expertise in networking, database management, servers, chips, and artificial intelligence (AI). The financial and employee efforts are buoyed by a surge in cloud computing demand that has accelerated during the COVID-19 pandemic. Amazon said it planned to create 3,500 new technology and corporate jobs at its hubs in Dallas, Detroit, Denver, New York, Phoenix, and San Diego. The cloud and e-commerce giant said it will invest more than $1.4 billion in offices and staff located in the six U.S. cities to support multiple divisions, including Amazon Web Services (AWS), Amazon Advertising, Amazon Fashion, OpsTech, and Amazon Fresh. Various roles for cloud infrastructure architects, software engineers, data scientists, product managers, and user experience designers will be added, according to the company.