Cisco’s recent history is peppered with instances of missed quarters that deliver on results but offer poor outlook. After a restructuring that saw the company cut 6,500 jobs, kill its consumer-oriented products, sell off its Mexico-based manufacturing operations to China’s Foxconn and recalibrate its long-term growth expectations with the financial community, the pressure is on Cisco and its CEO John Chambers to show that the changes were not only for the better, but that they’re taking hold.

Cisco is supposedly back in fighting trim. A new ad campaign, coupled with aggressive strategies in new market areas like cloud computing, coupled with a pivot away from unsuccessful consumer products, suggest that the company is back on track. But can the apparent progress made last quarter stick?

Analysts are expecting a profit of 43 cents a share on sales of $11.23 billion. Analyst Sanjiv Wadhwani of Stifel Nicolaus expects the results to come in slightly better than that. Writing in a research note to clients last week, he checked Cisco’s channel and found that sales of switching products, weak in recent quarters, appears on track to better than expected. Router sales appeared stronger versus competitors, specifically Juniper, despite a relatively weak environment for IT spending overall.

Geographically, spending in the U.S. was steady and, surprisingly, so was spending in Europe, except for in southern European countries like Greece and Italy, were the sovereign debt crisis has been so acute.

Weaknesses will be apparent, Wadhwani says, in sales of set-top boxes, suffering, in part, because of the shortage of hard drives as a result of the flooding in Thailand. Gross margins, a key metric of profitability, may be down slightly in part of a large sale of aggressively priced routers to China. One bright spot of note: During the quarter, Cisco announced that its Unified Computing System — its cloud computing hardware offering — has reached 10,000 customers and is, roughly, a $1 billion business.

Wadhwani says he expects Chambers to set a positive tone in his guidance. “As far as orders are concerned, feedback has been generally positive and consequently we expect the company to provide solid guidance for April. We also expect a positive tone from CEO John Chambers with optimism about the U.S. leading the world in an economic recovery.” That would be a nice change from the depressing results announced a year ago.

The three affected plants focus on smartphone production, and Nokia said it planned to shift much of that work to Asia, in order to be closer to its suppliers and speed up the time it takes to get products ready. Nokia will continue to do some customization work at all three plants.

“With the planned changes, our factories at Komarom, Reynosa and Salo will continue to play an important role serving our smartphone customers,” Nokia Executive VP Niklas Savander said in a statement. “They give us a unique ability to both provide customization and be more responsive to customer needs.”

The cuts will be phased in through the end of the year.

Nokia, of course, is in the midst of a major transformation, as it makes Windows Phone its primary operating system, shifting away from its homegrown Symbian OS.

The company previously announced other rounds of job cuts, including one related to the closure of a plant in Romania.

Earlier this month, Gilt Groupe CEO Kevin Ryan downplayed rumors that the New York-based company was undergoing a massive restructuring.

He said that nearly all of Gilt Groupe’s 900 employees and business units would remain intact, despite reports that painted a fairly grim picture of the situation.

Today, Ryan confirmed that the final tally ended up being from 80 to 90 people, and that John Auerbach, who headed Park & Bond, its men’s full-priced apparel site, and Nathan Richardson, who ran Gilt City, would both be leaving, after a transition period.

All of the cuts are designed to get the company to cash flow positive by the second quarter, and profitable by the fourth quarter, Ryan said.

Additionally, Ryan said that Richardson and Auerbach, who was Gilt’s fifth employee, are leaving because both are better suited for running start-ups.

“I will be their No. 1 reference,” he said.

An internal memo announcing the departures is expected to be sent around later this afternoon.

On Friday, the cuts focused on Gilt City, the company’s daily deals site that, despite its high-end focus, was competing head to head with others, such as Groupon, LivingSocial and the many other clones in the market.

Ryan said there will be a lot of consolidation in the daily deals space going forward, but that in certain markets it remains a good business for the company, including New York, which is its most profitable division.

“I think you’ll end up with a smaller group of companies. There will be a couple of high-end players, like ourselves and Bloomspot, and then there will be a couple of verticals, like restaurants or kids, and that’s it,” he said.

As part of Friday’s cuts, the company confirmed that it will no longer have offices in Seattle, Dallas and Atlanta. Additional offices it gained through the acquisition of BuyWithMe, including San Diego, Houston and Philadelphia, will also close.

Customers in those markets will receive national deals, but only local deals that are sourced through a centralized sales team. Going forward, Gilt will have offices in New York, San Francisco, Los Angeles, Boston, Chicago, Miami and Washington, D.C.

Earlier this month, Ryan had said he had only expected to lay off about 50 staffers, much less than the rumored 170.

On Friday, New York Magazine reported that more than 100 people were laid off, naming both Richardson and Auerbach as departing executives. It also reported that staffers, who once received a fridge full of snacks, would no longer have a daily supply of fruit, yogurt, cheese and Pellegrino water.

Over the past year, the company expanded quickly beyond its roots as a flash sales site, adding Park & Bond, Gilt City and Gilt Taste, a high-end grocery site. It continues to be in about seven businesses.

Some of the areas that were also restructured were the newer sites, like Gilt Taste and Park & Bond, which Ryan said took more resources to get up and running than it took to run on a day-to-day basis.

Gilt, which raised $138 million in capital last May, is on track for an IPO, perhaps as early as the fourth quarter, but more likely in 2013, Ryan added.

Ryan called AllThingsD this morning to clear the air after a report in BetaBeat painted a fairly grim picture of the situation.

BetaBeat reported this morning that as many as 170 employees would be laid off today; that Gilt Taste, the company’s high-end grocery site, was likely to be closed down; and that Jetsetter, its travel operations, was likely to be merged with Gilt City, its daily deal division.

On pretty much all accounts, Ryan declared not guilty.

“We are not closing down any businesses. We are not closing down Gilt Taste, and we aren’t merging Gilt City and Jetsetter,” he said.

Additionally, another new division, Park & Bond, which sells full-priced men’s clothing, is also doing well. “In its fifth month of business, Park & Bond did more revenue than any other business in its fifth month,” Ryan added.

The one grain of truth in all of it, he said, is that over the next couple of months, he expects to selectively trim staff by roughly 50 employees.

But for emphasis, he added, the company will still end up having more employees by the end of March than it does now.

“It’s pretty minimal in the scheme of having 900 employees,” he said. “Not only will we do that [have cutbacks], but we will continue to do that. What Gilt needs to be, and is doing, is to create a fantastic consumer experience while running an efficient company.”

He said the company achieved its goal of generating $500 million in June and now is setting its sights on transitioning the business from a money-losing organization to cash-flow break even this year.

He also said that Gilt Groupe, which raised $138 million in capital last May, is on track for an IPO, perhaps as early as the fourth quarter, but more likely in 2013.

“The timing feels about right, and we are on a steady progression,” said Ryan, who declined to give revenue estimates for this year because the company is in the sensitive lead-up to a public offering.

Ryan named two divisions that may see cuts over the next couple of months: Gilt Taste and Gilt City.

In October, Gilt City purchased BuyWithMe, and although it hired only 20-25 of the deal provider’s 190 employees, Ryan said they probably don’t need that many going forward now that the integration has been completed.

Additionally, he said there are some inefficiencies within Gilt Taste.

Ryan characterized the site as “doing great,” but said it will need fewer staffers now that it is up and running. At first, it needed to negotiate deals with dozens of vendors and shoot photos of the more than 1,000 products on the site.

Now that they’ve hit a baseline of items, they’ll probably add only a couple hundred new products a year, reducing the need for so much staff.

“There’s much less work to do there,” Ryan said. “With flash sales, you have to do that process every week, but in the full-priced business, there’s greater start-up costs. That’s part of the business.”

In particular, BetaBeat said Park & Bond President John Auerbach was likely to leave the company.

Ryan said there’s always the chance one of the top 15 executives could leave, whether it was their decision or the company’s, but that Auerbach is still working there as of now.

Nokia Siemens, a joint venture between Finland’s Nokia Corp. and Germany’s Siemens AG, had 74,000 employees on Nov. 1.

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The job cuts will hit the company globally and will be completed by the end of the first quarter of 2012, the company said in a statement. The company says the move will reduce operating expenses by $118 million in 2012 and by $10 million in the fourth quarter of 2011.

The cuts will amount to about 1,400 of AMD’s 12,000-strong workforce. What you’ll read elsewhere is that AMD is suffering from a worldwide slowdown in PCs, caused in large part by the growth of Apple’s iPad business and to a lesser extent other tablets. But it’s a little more complicated than that when you consider that AMD’s share of the market actually grew slightly in the second quarter, according to the latest numbers I have from Mercury Research, which tracks the market share between the two chipmakers. As of August, AMD was running a 19.4 percent share of the PC and server business, up from 18.2 percent in the first quarter, while Intel’s share dropped slightly from 81 percent in the first quarter to 79.9 percent in the second. Those fractions of a percentage point actually matter to both companies.

The bigger problem is that AMD is nowhere in tablets or smart phones and that was one of the reasons that Read was brought in to replace Dirk Meyer, who surprised everyone by resigning after a fight with his board of directors in January.

In the meantime, expect AMD to make a big fuss about server chips in the coming weeks.

AMD’s statement is below.

AMD Optimizes Cost Structure to Enhance Competitiveness and Accelerate Growth

Operational Savings of More Than $200 Million in 2012 Designed to Accelerate Future Growth in Lower Power, Emerging Markets and the Cloud

SUNNYVALE, CA–(Marketwire -11/03/11)- AMD (NYSE: AMD – News) today announced a restructuring plan and implementation of operational efficiency initiatives designed to strengthen the company’s competitive positioning. AMD expects that these combined actions will create a more competitive cost structure and rebalance the company’s global workforce skillsets, helping AMD to continue delivering industry-leading products while improving productivity, reducing time-to-market and better aligning with key industry trends that are expected to drive growth.

“Reducing our cost structure and focusing our global workforce on key growth opportunities will strengthen AMD’s competitiveness and allow us to aggressively pursue a balanced set of strategic activities designed to accelerate future growth,” said Rory Read, AMD president and CEO. “The actions we are taking are designed to improve our ability to consistently address the needs of our global customer base and stake leadership positions in lower power, emerging markets and the cloud.”

AMD expects that the restructuring plan will result in operational savings, primarily in operating expenses, of approximately $10 million in the fourth quarter of 2011 and $118 million in 2012, primarily through a reduction of its global workforce by approximately 10% and the termination of existing contractual commitments. The workforce reduction will occur across all functions globally and is expected to be substantially completed by the end of the first quarter of 2012. Based on anticipated savings from the restructuring plan, AMD expects fourth quarter 2011 operating expenses will be approximately $610 million.

As a result of implementing efficiencies across the company’s operations, AMD expects to save approximately $90 million in 2012 operating expenses in addition to the restructuring plan savings, resulting in more than $200 million of expected combined operational savings in 2012.

The company expects to reinvest a significant portion of the savings to fund initiatives designed to accelerate AMD’s strategies for lower power, emerging markets, and the cloud.

The company’s actions pursuant to the restructuring plan will take place primarily during fourth quarter of 2011, with some restructuring plan activities extending into 2012. The company currently estimates that it will record restructuring expense in the fourth quarter of 2011 and in 2012 of approximately $101 million and $4 million, respectively. Of the total restructuring expense, approximately $56 million will be future cash expenditures in 2011, $33 million will be future cash expenditures in 2012 and $15 million will be future cash expenditures in 2013.

About AMD
AMD (NYSE: AMD – News) is a semiconductor design innovator leading the next era of vivid digital experiences with its groundbreaking AMD Fusion Accelerated Processing Units (APUs) that power a wide range of computing devices. AMD’s server computing products are focused on driving industry-leading cloud computing and virtualization environments. AMD’s superior graphics technologies are found in a variety of solutions ranging from game consoles, PCs to supercomputers. For more information, visit http://www.amd.com.

As a result, Motorola will take a net pre-tax charge to earnings of approximately $31 million. Of that, $27 million will be related to severance costs and $4 million to facility exit costs.

“Both of the Company’s business segments (the Mobile Devices business and the Home business), as well as various corporate functions, are impacted by the action and the action affects employees globally,” Motorola said the filing.

Motorola still expects the Google deal to close by late 2011 or early 2012, the same target date it set when the companies announced the acquisition in August.

Jason Calacanis

The layoffs eliminated 18 employees, leaving Mahalo with a headcount of 49, Rapp said. They happened on Oct. 5.

These aren’t the first layoffs for Mahalo. The company had 102 employees in February of this year before making layoffs spurred by Google’s “Panda” update, which downgraded content designed to rank highly in search results. Mahalo was even larger a few years ago when it focused on building its own search alternative, Rapp said.

Rapp noted that while Mahalo’s videos get 30 million views per month, they are not necessarily profitable based on YouTube ads. Educational iPad apps, by contrast, seem to be instant money makers, because users will pay for them. Mahalo plans to gear up to release one app per week, though it only has four out so far. It will also continue to make educational videos.

Mahalo, which is backed by Sequoia Capital, News Corp. and CBS, soon plans to move its headquarters to Culver City from Santa Monica, Rapp said, and it has $5 million of funding in the bank to fuel its shift to instructional content.

Calacanis photo by Flickr user eirikso.

In a Thursday memo to staff, the executive editor of The New York Times, Jill Abramson, and others said that “no matter how many people do or do not raise their hands,” no one in the newsroom would be laid off as a result of the buyout program. The memo also said the Times reserves “the right to turn down some volunteers who are in those areas of the newsroom where we feel we cannot reduce our numbers.”

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When Specific Media bought Myspace in June for $35 million and said it had wrangled Timberlake as an investor, the company preannounced a press conference for Aug. 17.

(Kara Swisher had labeled the Timberlake bit as “stunt casting,” which is to say, “the worrisome look-at-the-shiny-celebrity approach.”)

That press conference date was soon postponed, as the new owners’ progress on Myspace was more “incremental” than transformative, according to The Wall Street Journal.

And last week, Specific laid off a small percentage of its staff, as reported by TechCrunch. In an emailed statement, Specific Media COO Chris Vanderhook described the layoffs as part of a streamlining process that reflected “big progress made toward achieving our goals.”

As for tonight’s “Future of Myspace Talk,” Timberlake is set to appear — or at least someone named “Justin” is — according to an agenda sent to us by Myspace PR and printed below. (I removed the locations, as most of the events are private.)

Monday, October 3, 2011

10:00 AM — Reuters Leadership Roundtable. Tim Vanderhook, CEO of Specific Media will participate in a candid discussion on challenges and opportunities in today’s disruptive landscape.

8:00 PM — The Future of Myspace Talk: Tim, Chris and Justin host a private reception for 40-55 CMOs and senior marketers to discuss the strategy for Myspace, highlight first-100-day learning and achievements and outline advertising opportunities for brands. Update: A representative for Myspace says this has moved to 5 p.m.

9:00 PM — MySpace AMP’d UP Opening Concert. By invitation only.

Tuesday, October 4, 2011

3:30 PM — New York City Game Changer’s Panel. Al Dejewski, SVP of Global Marketing for Specific Media will join other top marketers and panel moderator Hon. Katherine Oliver, Commissioner from the NYC Mayor’s Office of Media and Entertainment, to examine how these dynamic leaders are fostering change and reinventing the industry at “breakneck” speed.

7:30 PM — IAB MIXX Awards Ceremony. Bill Schild, Regional Vice President, East Coast for Specific Media will present the Interactive Video Award.

The company plans to close a facility in Romania and location services facilities in Malvern, Penn., and Bonn, Germany, with the job cuts coming by the end of this year. The reductions are in addition to the cuts Nokia announced earlier this year. Furthermore, the company said it is starting to reevaluate its staffing levels at a number of other facilities, with an eye toward cutting more jobs next year.

Nokia is in the process of shifting from a smartphone strategy focused around its aging Symbian platform to one based on Microsoft’s Windows Phone operating system. Its first Windows Phone devices are due out later this year.

“We are seeing solid progress against our strategy, and with these planned changes we will emerge as a more dynamic, nimble and efficient challenger,” CEO Stephen Elop said in a statement. “We must take painful, yet necessary, steps to align our workforce and operations with our path forward.”

Separately, Nokia said both it and Siemens are investing a further 500 million Euros into their Nokia Siemens telecom gear joint venture.

The company, which announced plans to shutter its webOS hardware business back in August, is sacking hundreds of employees as a result.

Sources close to HP say the company plans to lay off as many as 525 employees, and that it began carrying out that dreadful duty this week.

Reached for comment, HP confirmed that layoffs were underway, but declined to provide an actual number.

“As communicated on August 18, HP will discontinue the development of webOs devices within the fourth quarter of fiscal year 2011, which ends Oct. 31, 2011,” an HP spokesperson told AllThingsD. “As part of this decision, the webOS GBU is undergoing a reduction in workforce. Today’s actions are part of this initiative. During this time, we stand by our commitment to our webOS customers and will work to ensure that support and service for customers are not adversely affected. HP is exploring ways to leverage webOS software.”

Former and current employees of the Chinese joint venture, which operates the website Gaopeng.com, say more than 10 offices around China have been closed, including one in the northern city of Tangshan where an employee said he and his co-workers were locked out last Friday after their lunch break just after being notified of the shutdown.

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If RIM’s layoffs addressed any of the concerns orbiting the company, the market didn’t show it. Perhaps that’s because three-quarters of the 2,000 jobs eliminated were created in the past six months. As Ironfire Capital founder Eric Jackson notes, RIM ended its fourth quarter in February with 17,500 employees. If the 2,000 layoffs the company announced Monday dropped its headcount to 17,000, then 1,500 of them were essentially new hires brought on board during the company’s precipitous decline.

Says Jackson, “In other words, that 11 percent workforce reduction is really just a 2.8 percent reduction of RIM’s pre-February workforce levels.”

Sacking 2,000 employees isn’t so much a sign of RIM coming to terms with the grim reality it faces as it is an indication of just how scattered its leadership is. These layoffs read more like the correction of a staffing error than they do a decisive move to push RIM toward a rebound. And really, they do nothing to address the long-term issues that have folks so worried about the future of the company. Cutting expenses in the face of declining revenue is a wise move, but it doesn’t make RIM’s handsets any more compelling, its strategy any more cogent or its leadership any more reliable.

As I wrote earlier this year, “RIM’s hopeless downward spiral is the result of missteps and flaws that go way beyond its inability to meet guidance. RIM has failed to innovate. It has failed to execute. It has failed to understand the consumer market, which is increasingly informing enterprise support and purchasing decisions. And its comedy-of-errors management has consistently refused to take responsibility for those failures, because it doesn’t seem to see them as a problem.”

And if you think that’s a bit too harsh, or unfair, consider this: In 2008 RIM was an $83 billion company. Its market cap as of market close Monday: $13.98 billion.

Of those leaving the company, 2,100 are taking a voluntary retirement buyout package that’s been made available to people whose age and years of service add up to a sum of 50 60. For example, an employee 40 50 years old with 10 years at Cisco would be eligible. An additional 4,400 will lose their jobs outright, but will no doubt receive severance packages. The remaining 5,000 or so are employees of a Cisco plant in Mexico that is being sold to Foxconn, the Taiwanese contract manufacturer. They will become Foxconn employees.

These reductions are the third significant step in what’s expected to be a four-step process, spearheaded by CEO John Chambers, to get Cisco on a leaner, more competitive and more profitable path. Analysts are, so far, fairly positive on the cuts.

Brian Marshall of Gleacher & Co. in San Francisco, who last week predicted that Cisco would cut 5,000, gave a tentative thumbs-up to the move. Cisco’s goal throughout the process has been to take out $1 billion in annual operating costs. Marshall says that it looks like Cisco could do better than that: He thinks the cuts could yield $1.7 billion in savings and add 25 cents in per-share earnings to the bottom line in 2012.

Breaking it down, he says the 6,500 jobs cut could result in $1.3 billion in savings from retirements and firings, assuming a cost of about $200,000 per head. The sale of the facility in Mexico will yield about $400 million in reduced cost of goods sold (COGS).

The next step, which Marshall expects in September, will be for Cisco to recalibrate its long-term financial expectations. Long accustomed to telling Wall Street to expect in the 12 to 17 percent range, the more realistic range for Cisco, Marshall says, is now closer to 10 percent, plus or minus a few points. Gross margin expectations will have to come down, too, to about 25 percent, down from a range of 28 to 31 percent.

Shaw Wu of Sterne Agee in San Francisco called the reductions “painful but necessary.” He notes that Silicon Valley hiring has been pretty strong of late and that those Cisco folks losing their jobs should have little trouble finding work at companies like Facebook, Apple or Google, though I’d suggest that Hewlett-Packard’s up-and-coming networking unit or Juniper will be eager to pick up some Cisco talent.

On the sale of the factory to Foxconn, Wu sees Cisco as winding up for a spin-off of the set-top box business. “We view the Foxconn transaction as effectively a restructuring of its lower margin set-top box business and think ironically, could make a potential future spin-off easier with the manufacturing detached.”

Update: A few of you have written to say my initial characterization of the retirement package terms was incorrect. The required sum of age plus years of service is 60, not 50. Sorry about that.

The number of jobs cut will be 6,500, of which 2,100 are leaving via the voluntary retirement program. The company also says it plans to eliminate about 15 percent of executives at the vice president level and above. The reduction amounts to about 9 percent of Cisco’s total work force.

Cisco will take a one-time $1.3 billion charge to cover the costs of the restructuring, of which $750 million will be recognized during Q4.

On top of the outright job cuts, Cisco says it has agreed to sell a set-top box manufacturing facility in Juarez, Mexico, to Foxconn Technology, the Taiwanese contract manufacturing giant. The sale will include the transfer of about 5,000 employees from Cisco’s payroll to Foxconn’s, effective the first quarter of Cisco’s fiscal year 2012.

The combined number of jobs leaving Cisco’s payroll through retirement, transfer to Foxconn or outright firing is 11,500. That number amounts to about 14 percent of Cisco’s total headcount of 78,000 and change. If the plan that CEO John Chambers announced during the company’s most recent earnings conference call holds true to the plan and Cisco cuts $1 billion from its annual operating costs, then the average savings works out to about $87,000 per job.

The announcement is below.

Cisco Announces Additional Detail on Comprehensive Action Plan

SAN JOSE, CA–(Marketwire – 07/18/11) – Cisco (NASDAQ:CSCO – News) today announced additional details of its comprehensive action plan to simplify the organization, refine operations, and reduce annual operating expenses.

Workforce Reduction of Approximately 6,500 Employees
As part of the company’s $1 billion annual operating expense reduction, Cisco will reduce its global workforce across all functions by approximately 6,500 employees, which includes approximately 2,100 employees who elected to participate in a voluntary early retirement program. This also includes a reduction totaling approximately 15 percent of vice president level and above employees. This represents a reduction of approximately 9 percent of Cisco’s regular full-time workforce. All affected employees will receive severance pay and outplacement assistance.

Impacted employees in the United States, Canada and select countries will be notified during the first week of August. The remainder of the global workforce reductions are expected to occur at a later date in compliance with local laws and regulations.

In connection with this plan, Cisco estimates that it will recognize total pre-tax restructuring charges to its GAAP financial results in an amount not expected to exceed $1.3 billion over several quarters, consisting of severance and other one-time termination benefits. Substantially all of these charges are cash-based. Cisco expects that approximately $750 million of these charges will be recognized during the fourth quarter of fiscal 2011, including approximately $500 million relating to the voluntary early retirement program. The remaining balance of the charges is expected to be recognized during fiscal 2012.

In connection with Cisco’s continued implementation of its comprehensive action plan to simplify the organization, refine operations, and reduce annual operating expenses, it is anticipated that Cisco will recognize other restructuring charges to its GAAP financial results. These additional charges will be disclosed in earnings conference calls and in Securities and Exchange Commission filings.

Manufacturing Facility Sale to Include Transfer of Approximately 5,000 Employees
Cisco also announced earlier today an agreement for sale of its set-top box manufacturing facility in Juarez, Mexico, to Foxconn Technology Group. The approximately 5,000 people employed at the facility will become employees of Foxconn in the first quarter of fiscal 2012 and no job losses are expected as a result of the sale. This figure is in addition to the approximately 6,500 employees impacted by the reduction in workforce and the voluntary early retirement program. While this action is expected to create improvements to Cisco’s long term cost structure, the strategic intent for this action is to simplify business operations. The labor cost associated with these employees has been categorized as manufacturing costs.

Forward-Looking Statements
This press release may be deemed to contain forward-looking statements, which are subject to the safe harbor provisions of the Private Securities Litigation Reform Act of 1995, including statements regarding the timing of reduction in force, the amount of related charges, Cisco’s planned annual operating expense reduction and Cisco’s sale of its set-top box manufacturing facility. Readers are cautioned that these forward-looking statements are only predictions and may differ materially from actual future events or results due to a variety of factors, including: Cisco’s ability to implement the workforce reductions in various geographies; possible changes in the size and components of the expected costs and charges associated with the plan; risks associated with Cisco’s ability to achieve planned reductions; and Cisco’s ability to execute the sale of its set-top box manufacturing facility. For information regarding other factors that could cause Cisco’s results to vary from expectations, please see the “Risk Factors” section of Cisco’s filings with the Securities and Exchange Commission, including its most recent quarterly report on Form 10-Q. Cisco undertakes no obligation to revise or update publicly any forward-looking statements.

About Cisco
Cisco (NASDAQ:CSCO – News) is the worldwide leader in networking that transforms how people connect, communicate and collaborate. Information about Cisco can be found at http://www.cisco.com. For ongoing news, please go to http://newsroom.cisco.com.

RIM declined comment on the news Tuesday, but the move comes just days after it announced plans to cut an unspecified number of jobs as part of what co-CEO Jim Balsillie euphemistically described as a “streamlining.”

“I wouldn’t call this a reorganization or a restructuring,” he said last week. “If we don’t have an efficient organization, that’s not helping anybody. This is more of a streamlining exercise.”

PREVIOUSLY:

• RIM Downgraded From “Can’t Get Worse” to “Worse”
• Analyst Consensus on RIM: Look Out Below
• RIM Co-CEOs to Critics: We’re Awesome and We’re Not Going Anywhere
• RIM CEOs Insist Outsiders Don’t Get It, but Are We Really the Ones Confused?
• RIM Talks to the Street After BlackBerry’s Rough Quarter
• Research In Motion Slashes Its Forecast Amid BlackBerry Weakness, Plans Layoffs
• Break Out the Pepto-Bismol — RIM Reports Earnings Today
• Mission RIMpossible: Full-Year Earnings of $7.50 Per Share

To recap the highlights (or lowlights), RIM said that the weakness it saw last quarter is continuing and chopped its forecast for the year, saying that it now expects to earn only $5.25 to $6.00 per share. At the time of its April earnings warning, the company insisted it could still do $7.50 per share in earnings for the year, though many analysts were highly skeptical.

And, to meet even the lower forecast, RIM plans to cut costs, including an unspecified number of job cuts.

2:01 pm: Still got the hold music. Look, guys, it’s going to a bloodbath. Making the analysts wait won’t calm them down any.

2:02 pm: All participants are in a seethe-only mode.

2:03 pm: Warning about forward-looking statements. (Substitute hope and pray for “believe” and you should be fine.)

2:06 pm: Shortfall last quarter due to lower demand in U.S. amid older product lineup as well as issues in Latin America.

Delays in new products are excluding RIM from some back-to-school promotions it hoped to be part of, further hurting things for the current quarter, which goes through August.

2:07 pm: Interesting note: Both co-CEOs are on the conference call. Usually just Balsillie, who is currently outlining (but not giving specifics) on cost cuts.

2:08 pm: Balsillie on PlayBook tablet: “We were pleased to ship approximately 500,000 units during the quarter.”

Balsillie acknowledged launch didn’t go as smoothly as the company had planned. Talks about update that added video chat and Facebook, but no mention of promised email client.

2:10 pm: FYI, my battery is low, so going to be turning things over to the highly talented John Paczkowski to cover the bulk of the carnage, including the duck-and-cover — I mean question-and-answer period.

2:11 pm: Balsillie talking about media’s concern about the company’s dual-CEO structure. “I believe, and I think Mike would agree, that neither of us could have completed this transition alone.”

He suggests that it is a critical time for RIM and only they are equipped to handle it.

“I agree with Jim’s comments,” co-CEO Mike Lazaridis added. “We know what we have to do jointly to accomplish” what we need to.

“We understand that weathering this transition has been difficult for our shareholders and employees,” he said. “While I can’t promise there won’t be bumps ahead,” Lazaridis said he and Balsillie have never been more committed.

2:14 pm: RIM does things differently, Balsillie said, noting that its reasoning isn’t always obvious to outsiders.

Balsillie said RIM was already well down a development path to the next-generation handsets when it realized it needed to do things differently for North America.

BlackBerry Bold 9900 with touchscreen, announced at BlackBerry World, will be the first BlackBerry 7 handset.

The company hopes once it is approved by carriers other devices will quickly follow.

2:19 pm: “I would like nothing more than to have gotten out these BlackBerry 7 handsets sooner,” says Lazaridis. “But when you see what strong devices they are, you’ll realize it was worth the wait.

2:20 pm: More about how wonderful the new BB7 devices will be, but no further details on release dates. Moving on to the PlayBook, Lazaridis mentions that the tablet will get native email and BBM this summer.

He wraps up with: “We have strong business, we have made a major platform upgrade and we are nearly through that transition.”

2:22 pm: Running through numbers from the earnings release. You’ll find those here.

2:24 pm: After a quick wrap-up from Balsillie, the call moves on to the Q&A …

2:29 pm: One more note from their guidance — they don’t expect BlackBerry 7 devices to contribute until the end of the current quarter.

2:27 pm: Q: What’s you confidence level in the timing of these new product launches? Should we be worried?

Lazaridis: We can never be absolutely certain that we’ll get through certification without any hiccups. But we feel confident about the state of our code. Since our new products are all based on a single platform, once we get one certified we can leverage that across the board with other carriers. … I’m feeling very good about the certification of our products.

2:30 pm: A quick follow-up question about QNX guidance for early 2012. Lazaridis says it hasn’t changed.

2:32 pm: In regards to PlayBook sales, RIM is “very pleased” with sell-through and seeding. No specifics offered, though. Though they’d been promised for the summer, the report is now, “you are going to start seeing the 4G PlayBooks coming out in the fall.”

2:35 pm: Another question about QNX timing. Sounds like you’re rolling it out just months after BB7 hits the market. Does that make sense?

Lazaridis says it does, notes the difference in feature sets, says QNX-based “superphones” with their PlayBook-like features are targeted at the higher end of the market.

2:36 pm: Balsillie wanders off on a meandering rumination about the difference in the public’s perception of RIM and what the company has “hidden under the covers.”

2:40 pm: He hands off to Lazaridis who lauds the PlayBook and seems to be saying that customers disappointed with the PlayBook will be less so in the future because RIM will constantly improve it.

2:42 pm: Q: Will the restructuring impact your ability to launch new products?

Balsillie takes issue with the word “restructuring.” He would rather everyone describe it with the euphemism “streamlining.” And, in answer to the question, no, it won’t.

Also: don’t call it a “re-org,” either.

2:44 pm: Balsillie: “This is just leaning out to reinvest … we don’t want to just be able to do everything just because we can. So I wouldn’t call this a re-org or a restructuring.”

2:46 pm: More from Balsillie: “You know, we’ve just been so busy growing and selling product that I think this is really the right time for us to step back and make the system more efficient.”

2:48 pm: Question about corporate governance and the co-CEO structure. Balsillie obviously loves it. So does Lazaridis.

“This is fun,” says Lazaridis. “We’re changing the world. … Jim and I have the perfect balance to make the hard decisions.”

2:51 pm: Backslapping continues. “We birthed a tablet in a year … we transitioned to a new operating system.”

Meanwhile RIM shares are down 13 percent in after-hours trading.

2:54 pm: Still more backslapping. It’s almost like Lazaridis and Balsillie think they’re doing talk radio instead of an earnings call.

2:57 pm: Translation of last five minutes of call: “You know our new products are just so awesome, aren’t they, Jim? Boy, they sure are, Mike. And you know what? You’re awesome, too.”

3:02 pm: And that’s it. Thanks for joining us.

Cisco COO Gary Moore confirmed on a conference call with analysts Wednesday that job cuts are coming, and CEO John Chambers made repeated references to plans for Cisco to exit businesses where it is not already a number 1 or number 2 player in the marketplace and to take $1 billion out of annual operating expenses.

During the conference call, CFO Frank Calderoni said that Cisco’s headcount as of the close of the quarter was 73,408 and that 40 percent of that number constituted jobs added through acquisitions of other companies. The four analysts that Reuters asked said the company could cut up to 4,000 jobs, with an average forecast of 3,000. That would amount to 4 or 5 percent of Cisco’s workforce.

That number could be mitigated a bit by the early retirement program that Cisco has initiated. Chambers mentioned it a few times during the conference call, and as yet it’s unknown how many Cisco employees will take advantage of it. Calderoni said to expect a one-time charge in Q4–the current quarter–ranging from $500 million to $1.1 billion depending on how many employees decide to jump. They have several more weeks to decide. We’ve already seen a lot of early departures within the ranks of its upper management. And given its 26-year history, there are probably many people who are in a place where they can double dip, taking a severance or retirement package from Cisco and then move straight into another job.

Analysts have been all over the map in their critique of Cisco’s attempt to turn things around. Generally they’re positive on the resolve of Chambers and the rest of his team to cut back on operating expenses and exit businesses that Cisco can’t dominate, but that leads to bigger long term questions. Will the cuts be enough? And will Cisco be able to properly defend its traditional turf in the networking businesses from persistent attack by Juniper Networks, and other upstart players like F5 and Hewlett-Packard, which has been winning new accounts by offering a 20 percent discount to customers who trade in old Cisco gear.

While it’s never a good time to lose one’s job, the timing could certainly be worse. Hiring at tech companies, especially in and around Silicon Valley, is surging both at established companies like LinkedIn and at start-ups. A recent survey by Silicon Valley Bank found that 83 percent of start-ups expect to add jobs during the year. Time at an industry titan like Cisco has to count for something.

“We are not announcing how many and in what country. But there will be substantial reductions in employment in various locations around the world, and that too will affect Finland.”

– Nokia CEO Stephen Elop, February 2011

When Nokia first announced its mobile alliance with Microsoft back in February, Nokia CEO Stephen Elop warned that job cuts would follow. He didn’t say when or how many, only that they’d be “substantial.” Today we’ve got a better idea of what that means.

Finnish office-worker union representative Antti Rinne claims Nokia plans to cut up to 6,000 jobs in research and development. And he expects the cuts to be announced by the end of this month. That’s a massive reduction–about 38 percent of Nokia’s global R&D workforce–but a necessary one as the company transitions to its new smartphone strategy.

Remember, Nokia’s R&D spend is nearly three times that of its rivals and about five times that of Apple. There’s little reason to continue to spend that kind of cash on research and development now that the company’s dumped its own software platform in favor of Microsoft’s.

A spokeswoman declined to say what percentage of the company’s overall workforce that represents. Sony Online Entertainment, which is a subsidiary of Sony, will shift a lot of the work to its headquarters in San Diego.

In addition to the layoffs, Sony Online is also discontinuing production on an upcoming game, The Agency, which had been under development for four years and was slated for the PC and PlayStation console. The game studios are known for their work on EverQuest, Star Wars Galaxies, Untold Legends and Field Commander.

The decision to discontinue will allow the company to focus on two of its better known properties, PlanetSide and EverQuest. The layoffs and studio closures were initially reported by Kotaku.

Bloomberg reports that Sony Online Entertainment President John Smedley has said that the company plans to develop more free-to-play games, which aligns with the growing popularity of social games on Facebook. Those games require less money and time, he added.

Here’s Sony’s full statement:

“As part of a strategic decision to reduce costs and streamline its global workforce, SOE announced today that it will eliminate 205 positions and close its Denver, Seattle and Tucson studios. As part of this restructuring, SOE is discontinuing production of The Agency so it can focus development resources on delivering two new MMOs based on its renowned PlanetSide and EverQuest properties, while also maintaining its current portfolio of online games. All possible steps are being taken to ensure team members affected by the transition are treated with appropriate concern.

This strategic decision will have no impact on SOE’s current portfolio of live games; additionally SOE will transition development efforts for the Denver and Tucson studios’ suite of products to its San Diego headquarters. This strategic alignment of development resources better positions SOE to remain a global leader in online gaming and deliver on its promise of creating entertaining games for players of all ages, and servicing the 20 million players that visited SOE servers in just the past year.”