San Francisco: Juniper Networks Inc is eliminating 500 jobs, or about 5 per cent of its workforce, in an effort to trim expenses amid accelerating competition from networking-equipment makers led by Cisco Systems Inc, people with knowledge of the matter said.
The jobs being cut include some engineers involved with a set of products called QFabric, said the people, who asked not to be identified because the company hasn’t said which operations are affected.
QFabric, designed to help businesses operate data centres more efficiently, is key to Juniper’s efforts to expand beyond the phone companies that make up its customer core and court big corporations and internet service providers. The decline in head count dedicated to the project shows that the company is struggling to gain traction as customers consider alternatives from Cisco and Brocade Communications Systems Inc, as well as new technology called software-defined networking, which can lessen the need for hardware upgrades.
“They’ve been very slow to deliver it to market,” said Erik Suppiger, an analyst at JMP Securities LLC.
Analysts at Mizuho Securities said in a research note on Monday that QFabric has met with “modest sales.”
The jobs being eliminated are part of a plan outlined in July to cut costs by $150 million (Dh550.5 million) by 2013, said Ellen Roeckl, a spokeswoman for Sunnyvale, California-based Juniper. The company is dealing with slowing spending by large phone companies, and fiercer competition from market leader Cisco, which has refocused on its core business of selling routers and internet switches in the past year.
The cuts were previously reported by the TechTarget blog.
