Cisco has made 600-700 employees redundant at its Californian headquarters, according to a report in the Wall Street Journal.

The move comes despite CEO John Chambers’ vow at a Credit Suisse Technology conference in December 2008 that despite an ongoing hiring freeze on new positions, there would be no job cuts at the company.

In February, Cisco said it had cut 250 jobs, a relatively small amount given the large numbers of job cuts announced by companies such as Sun Microsystems, IBM and Microsoft. It said then that up to 2000 cuts were possible as the company focused on more profitable parts of the business.

Following the latest cuts, Cisco said it was “doing everything possible to minimise the impact on employees affected by the limited restructuring.”

Last week Cisco stole Nortel’s thunder by replacing the ailing telecoms giant as the communications infrastructure provider for the London 2012 Olympic Games. Olympic organisers said they wanted to deal with only one company and were concerned that Nortel was being split into pieces as other companies acquired its most profitable components.