Juniper has confirmed that ANZ MD Mark Iles has left the company, along with a number of other local staff as part of sweeping job cuts across the vendor’s global operations.

After announcing it was releasing around 500 employees, representing around 5% of its worldwide workforce, the company has now culled between 10-15% of its ANZ staff.

“Juniper is working to align its resources to improve productivity and effectiveness, enabling us to deliver our roadmap for innovation and unprecedented value to customers,” a Juniper APAC spokesperson told CommsDay.

“As a result of this important initiative, we are reducing our workforce by approximately 500 people in functions across the company.

“Our actions to reduce operating expenses fall across our support functions, including supply chain, procurement, SG&A, as well as R&D.

“They are being carefully planned and managed to maximize efficiencies in our cost structure while preserving the investments in innovation in our core businesses of data center, routing, switching and security.”

After being appointed to the role over 18 months ago, Iles leaves as part of wider jobs cuts within the company.

His departure represents a change of fortunes for the vendor who last year planned on recruiting dozens of new jobs in ANZ by expanding its presence in Melbourne with a new office.

The Juniper isn’t the only telco vendor to make cuts, following Alcatel Lucent revealing plans to cut its Indian workforce by 1,000 people as the company also struggles in a weakening global economy.

The French telecom equipment maker says due to the slow demand for equipment, they plan to reduce their workforce in the country by 9% as part of the company’s global restructuring drive.