This is where Cisco should be NOW
If Cisco weren't completely stupid, they would swipe in an make a public announcement that they will hire on the entire group of laid off staff for what their pay was when they were laid off.
At that point, if Cisco isn't entirely stupid, they will :
- start an enterprise ARM development team using the silicon developers.
- use the Infiniband team to implement a proper storage stack for supporting SMB Direct and iWARP, etc...
- use the operating system team to build a solid container platform for Docker. Cisco keeps trying to do something like this but without a good OS team to start with.
- use the ZFS team for ... well Cisco needs a legacy storage solution, so a ZFS/FCoE solution for VMware would be great. Do it on ARM as well and make a single chip storage solution by embedding it within the Cisco VIC FPGA and Cisco will make a fortune
This might be the best opportunity that either Cisco has had in a long time. It's almost as if Larry decided to just throw up a big bunch of gold into the air and let it land in about 2500 places around the world for Cisco to pick up.
It's a good thing if HP doesn't go picking it up, they wouldn't know what to do with an engineer if someone smacked Meg Wittman on the head with one.
Another alternative which would be amazing for this team... Nutanix should suck them up. Not in bits... but the whole damn group. It's easier to hire them all and weed out what you don't need later. 2500 employees is expensive... but Cisco and Nutanix have needed a team of developer like these for a while.
Also, if the teams are heavy on H1-Bs, I would just let them go. There is certainly no shortage of experts in what will be left when they're gone. If Oracle is anything like Cisco or most other companies, then that's about 30-50% of their development teams.