Cisco set to lay-off up to a fifth of its workforce

Cisco Systems was set to shed up to nearly a fifth of its staff as the US tech giant pursued its transformation towards software and away form hardware manufacturing.

Within the next few weeks, the US tech giant, best known for its state-of-the-art routers which help to rout massive amounts of data through the internet and corporate intranets, was expected to announce that it would lay-off between 9,000 to 14,000 employees around the world, CRN reported citing multiple sources close to the company.

Many workers had already been offered early retirement packages, sources told CRN.

Around the start of 2016 some analysts had predicted such cuts due to the lessened need for back-end processing as the firm's clients migrated towards the cloud and also in part due to Cisco's tardiness in embracing that seachange in the industry's landscape.

At the upper-end of the expected range the redundancies would mark the largest such announcement in the company's recent history.

As of 15:47 BST shares in Cisco were off by 2.04% to $30.49 ahead of its fiscal second quarter earnings figures which were scheduled for release after the close of trading in New York.