Channel Beat: Cisco Cuts Thousands Of Jobs, Butts Heads With Nutanix

Cisco will lay off up to 5500 employees as part of a massive restructuring, the company announced this week.

The networking giant will invest in growing areas like security and IoT, as well as next-generation data center and cloud.

The layoffs represent about 7 percent of Cisco's global workforce and will begin in Q1 of this fiscal year.

Cisco has not indicated whether more job cuts are on the horizon.

This week Nutanix debuted its hyper-converged infrastructure software stack for Cisco UCS C-Series servers, but Cisco had no actual part in the offering.

The software is not being sold by or in partnership with Cisco, and Cisco has privately disavowed the offering to its channel partners.

Cisco introduced its own HyperFlex solution in the spring, and the company has a go-to-market relationship with Nutanix competitor SimpliVity.

NetApp channel partners helped boost the vendor through its first financial quarter of fiscal 2017, accounting for 77 percent of the company's total revenue.

NetApp's recent business transition toward modern offerings like all-flash storage led to a dip in revenue, but profits are on the rise.

About 61 percent of NetApp's total product sales came from its strategic offerings, up about 10 percent from the same quarter last year.