To be announced end of this Q. Long rumored, finally here
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Having offices in the Bay Area is a sign of power unlike RTP or AST, where offices in those regions are for employees who can't afford to live in expensive cities like NYC and the Bay Area. Not trolling here, but that is how it was explained to me a few years back.
LR anyone who believes this
Pre-covid some of the buildings were packed, others were half-utilized or less. Pre-covid Cisco was working on plans to require vendors to provide their own office space and laptops to their employees. The plan was that they could work in a Cisco office only if the vendor resource needed on-site work space to do their job. Haven't heard much on that lately.
Since the mandatory WFH policy went into effect in Mar '20, I'd heard that Cisco was trying to make vendors provide their own office space. But I just don't see that happening. I've never worked for a vendor that had office space for their consultants. Most barely had space for their own recruiters, account executives, and some admin staff. At best, they'd just tell their consultants to work from home. At worst, if they had to lease a building for them, they'd pass that cost onto Cisco making it too expensive to use contractors.
Cisco will never make vendors provide their own laptops. It would be a IT management nightmare. IT can barely support a couple of models of laptops from two manufacturers (Lenovo and Apple). There's no way they can support all the other non-Lenovo brands of PCs out there. And with more and more services within Cisco becoming accessible without VPN using "Trusted Devices", IT would have to figure out how to manage all these other brands to allow access. Not gonna happen. Recycling used Lenovos to vendors instead of turning them back in to the leasing company due to vendor churn is cheap compared to the IT costs of trying to manage dozens of laptop models.
Allowing them to cut down on real estate costs by seating only on-site critical roles in offices and making the rest meeting spaces for meetings that can't be virtual is a much bigger savings. The real difficulty there is that they can't consolidate all the labs and data centers into fewer buildings. I recall a time when Bldg 7 was at capacity electrically. In order to bring in a new server, you had to decommission an older one to free up wattage. Luckily there was a lot of older systems that were inefficient and drew lots of power that could be swapped out for 2 newer, greener systems.
Same should be true in SJC. We've sold off a number of SJC buildings in recent years, changing work styles could see a few more on the chopping block. And if you were going to trim locations better to trim from the high cost more regulated locations.
Then again, the folks who make those decisions are largely sitting in SJC and would hardly consider losing such control over their little empires. There have been cases where teams were grown in RTP only to be shuttered by a SJC VP who insisted that the work had to be done in SJC.
It would absolutely make sense to sell a cluster of buildings given then new way of working. The most marketable would probably be 10,11&12 followed by 7,8 & 9. It is possible they could cherry pick and sell a building here and there of 1-6. As someone said the data centers scattered around create a problem. Cisco also owns quite a bit more land where there were plans in RTP to build additional buildings. It is probably fair to say that isn't needed now. But Cisco is not leaving the RTP area.
Yep long rumored. You say this every year. 🤣 I guess if you keep saying it, some day you might be correct.
Closed? I doubt it. Reduced? Definite possibility. GSK recently announced that they will leave RTP for Durham. Covid WFH has shown that they can get by with a much smaller office space.
Pre-covid some of the buildings were packed, others were half-utilized or less. Pre-covid Cisco was working on plans to require vendors to provide their own office space and laptops to their employees. The plan was that they could work in a Cisco office only if the vendor resource needed on-site work space to do their job. Haven't heard much on that lately.
I could see Cisco shedding a group of buildings in RTP. Problem is that they've spread data centers and labs across the campus building clusters that it's less easy to prune a group off. But for the price they'd get for 10, 11, and 12 they could fund the relocation and remodeling easily.
San Jose would be shuttered first before RTP is touched.
Not going to happen, there are still people who go on campus due to their customer base.
Hasn't RTP already been closed for 18 months? Cisco didn't go out of business. It is getting to the point where most all white collar companies aren't going to need half their real estate. Once we are 24 months into this, companies like Salesforce, LinkedIn, Oracle, Apple, etc. have to ask if their giant mega-palaces in the valley are still useful.
Exactly - people thought BXB was indispensable. And it’s gone. Frankly it wouldn’t surprise me if RTP is reduced to a floor on a building and the rest sold or leased. It’s a huge waste of resources.
Sorry, can't see this happening. Although they DID close BXB...which I also thought would NEVER happen.
Will never happen, RTP is a low cost area.
Texas does seem to be the new focus area since it’s so cheap.
What about Lawrenceville?
Not a chance... Fake News!
lmao, this sh-t again.
And your sources might be ?
Cousin of a friend of my aunt saw a spreadsheet ?