Juniper Networks has cut a small number of employees as part of a reorganization, but the figure is far fewer than a Business Insider estimate, according to a Juniper spokesperson.
The chatter started March 7, when Juniper announced "a new organizational structure to support its innovation transformation strategy." As part of the move, Kevin Hutchins moved into a new senior VP post to drive strategy and product line management. Also, Juniper's engineering organization now reports into Chief Development Officer Andy Athreya. Both executives report to Rami Rahim (pictured, top of story).
At the same time, Executive VP and GM Jonathan Davidson resigned from the company. Fast forward to present day, and Davidson has surfaced at Cisco to lead the company's Service Provider Networking organization.
Juniper Layoffs?
Amid the Juniper changes, the company had a small number of job cuts. Business Insider estimated the figure at 700 to 900 staff reductions, but a spokesperson told the media firm that the cuts were far smaller.
Juniper, like many other networking firms, is striving to diversify from traditional hardware sales, pushing hard into software-defined networking and security. Revenues were $1.4 billion in Q4 2016, up 5 percent from Q4 2015. Juniper's GAAP net income was $197.4 million in Q4 2016, essentially flat vs. Q4 2015. Sales to big service providers, in particular, are under pressure amid network and workload shifts to public cloud providers like Amazon Web Services and Microsoft Azure.
Meanwhile, rivals are making competitive moves. Cisco is emphasizing software subscriptions and security, while Hewlett Packard Enterprise (HPE) is buying up next-generation data center hardware providers. HPE's recent purchases include SimpliVity (hyperconverged infrastructure) and Nimble Storage (All Flash Arrays).
