"I wonder what Cisco sees as the difference between 'outsourcing' and a reorg that sent work to Cisco India and other areas," asks one Cisco source. "Aren't they one and the same thing? The bottom line is American engineers lost their jobs which were moved to India and other places because the other areas offered cheaper labor."
Adds another Cisco source: "A whole lot of US-based jobs were lost that you are not hearing about from Cisco."
The Cisco spokesman replied, "As a global company, Cisco focuses on building business competencies in different geographies, but Cisco is not currently planning on moving US job roles offshore as a part of this (February 4) restructuring plan."
History of NEDC/NMTG
Cisco at one time planned to employ as many as 5,000 at NEDC, which is comprised of several sites around Boston in addition to Boxborough. The company scaled that back to 2,400 when the Boxborough NEDC opened in 2003, but currently less that 2,000 are employed at the facility.
Plans for the NMTG outsourcing were started in February, 2008. Staffers were notified last November by NMTG Vice President and General Manager Steve Nye, in a meeting with four of the groups he manages.
Nye announced that the work being performed by those four groups -- one in Scotland, two in Boxborough, and one in RTP -- would be outsourced to Tech Mahindra in India. The two NMTG groups in Boxborough are called the Broadband Access Center (BAC) and the Cisco Network Registrar (CNR) groups.
CNR is in use at Merrill Lynch, Washington Mutual, Johns Hopkins University, Time Warner Cable, and CableVision, among others, sources say. BAC is in use at Canadian MSOs, Comcast, Charter, and several Japanese and Korean operators, they say.
"I believe there is going to be a big shakeup in the way that some of these products are developed," one source says.
There was also a Technical Publications group, consisting of around 16 employees, that worked on BAC and CNR documentation. Sources say 12-16 of these workers were outsourced but Cisco says the actual number is less than 10.
Once notified, there is a four-month "Transfer of Information" (TOI) period for affected NMTG employees, after which they would be offered a severance package on April 1, 2009. During the TOI period, the affected employees are free to look within and outside of Cisco for another job. The Cisco organization they are leaving will also pay for relocation if employees are able to find a job at an alternate Cisco location.
If they find another job during this time, they would forgo the Cisco severance package and 10 percent of their salary accrued during the TOI periods.
