My previous employer, Cisco Systems, has decided to restructure my business unit and as a result my choices were to either move or leave and since my family is quite happy in Northern Virginia, I decided to find employment elsewhere. The restructuring was necessary for Cisco, and personally I thought they should’ve taken action much sooner than they did. The company made a series of bad business decisions in the optical business, not the least of which was paying $6.9 billion for the start-up at which I worked. The world is moving to ethernet and IP and the focus should’ve been on leveraging the team’s existing experience in telecom (and SONET/SDH, in particular) to move to an IP-based platform. I was eager to see Cisco’s shift its image to a consumer-focused company—even though I think the new logo looks considerably worse than the old one. Even though I’m planning to get rid of my cable service in favor of FiOS TV, it would’ve been nice to see the Cisco enhancements to the SciAtl set-top boxes. And as a Cisco share-holder, the fact that consumer companies seem to have higher multiples has given the stock a nice little rise since early August. I’ll continue to keep my eye on Cisco and now that I’m no longer an employee I can blog about them much more freely.