Cisco: HP sues staff running from 'chaos'

Cisco’s general counsel Mark Chandler has criticised rival HP for allegedly suing another former employee that sought to change jobs.

Although Chandler did not mention who HP was suing, the timing suggests it concerns Paul Perez, HP’s former chief technologist, who joined Cisco this month, according to John Marsh, an attorney for Hahn and Loeser.  

Perez, the third Cisco hire to be sued by HP in two years, led HP’s StorageWorks and delivered its strategy for ProLiant servers, its BladeSystem and CloudSystem, according to his LinkedIn profile. 

Taking a swipe at the large changes underway at its networking and increasingly computing rival, Chandler believed HP will be filing more suits in the future.

“As headhunters and other companies are flooded with resumes from HP employees seeking safe ground amidst the chaos of executive turnover, we can probably expect to see more desperate moves to lock up human capital,” wrote Chandler. 

“In an unhappy work environment, it’s a strange decision to try to achieve employee retention by litigation.”

With ongoing hearings in California and an attempt by Cisco to resolve the matter out of court, HP reportedly filed a surprise suit in Texas, aiming to get a judge there to make a decision without Perez being present. 

The attempt failed, Chandler noted, allowing the person to start their new job at Cisco. 

HP found itself on the receiving end of a similar claim from IBM over its former general manager Giovanni Visentin, however as in HP’s case, IBM’s aggressive behaviour was not appreciated by the courts, the Wall Street Journal’s All Things Digital blog notes.