RESEARCH TRIANGLE PARK -- The ax will fall at Cisco Systems, Inc.

The company announced Wednesday afternoon in a press release:

"Today's market requires Cisco and our customers to be decisive, move with greater speed and drive more innovation than we've seen in our history. Today, we announced a restructuring enabling us to optimize our cost base in lower growth areas of our portfolio and further invest in key priority areas such as security, IoT, collaboration, next generation data center and cloud. We expect to reinvest substantially all of the cost savings from these actions back into these businesses and will continue to aggressively invest to focus on our areas of future growth. The restructuring will eliminate up to 5,500 positions, representing approximately 7 percent of our global workforce, and we will take action under this plan beginning in the first quarter of fiscal 2017."

"So the problem has to do with technology. It keeps changing, evolving. A product that was making a lot of money suddenly becomes obsolete and then the sales goes down," said computer expert Dr. Harry Perros of N.C. State, not affiliated with Cisco.

More than two years ago, Gov. Pat McCrory was at the RTP campus as the company announced bringing hundreds of jobs to the Triangle. Perros says the tech industry can be lucrative yet highly-competitive to push out the latest product.

"It's just the way it is. If you don't move on with technology, you're left behind, and then the company is dead," said Perros.