Leading networking company, Cisco Systems has announced to halt recruitment of fresh staff following global slowdown. The move would enable it to cut costs by 2 billion dollar. It would also employ other cost cutting measures to deal with the situation. Cisco has 30% market share in the Unified Communications (UC) domain and it is facing stiff competition from Microsoft and Avaya.

Cisco Systems Executive Vice-President and Chief Globalisation Officer, Wim Elfrink ruled out any retrenchment but maintained that it would not hire new staff. He was addressing reporters in the side lines of the World Economic Forum's function in New Delhi.

The company would take final decision about chalking out new business strategy within two months. It would currently concentrate on cost cutting measures, including minimizing travel cost.

Unified Communications market is expected to touch $48 billion mark by 2012. However, the growth is lower than expected earlier, due to the slow response from small and medium enterprises. Indian UC market is likely to exceed $1 billion as per forecast of Frost & Sullivan.