ing systems. In June 1999, Lucent made its largest acquisition ever when it bought Ascend Communications for $20 billion. The move made Lucent the leading provider of data networking equipment for service providers. In February 2000, Lucent bought Ortel Corp. for $2.95 billion. In June 2000, Lucent expanded once again when it purchased Chromatis Networks for $4.5 billion. Chromatis' Metropolis product allows multi-service traffic, such as voice, data and video, to travel efficiently on crowded metropolitan networks. Lucent acquired Spring Tide Networks, maker of network switching equipment, for $1.3 billion of stock in July to expand its Internet protocol market. Later that year, Lucent attempted, but ultimately walked away from a proposed $23.5 billion merger with French networking firm Alcatel. Some spin-offs of its own By the end of 2000, a declining industry and Lucent's plummeting stock price had hampered its ability to make new acquisitions. Additionally, Lucent was left holding the bag when some of its Internet start-up customers went bust after Lucent had financed their equipment purchases. And so, Lucent began to streamline its business, VAULT CAREER LIBRARY 2005 Vault Inc. Vault Guide to the Top Telecom Employers Lucent Technologies Inc. which included shedding many of the businesses it had purchased. Headcount was also dramatically reduced, both through the aforementioned sales of various operations and layoffs. At the end of 2001, some 30,000 employees had lost their jobs in the restructuring, bringing the total number of employees down to about 77,000. By April 2002, approximately 30,000 more jobs had been cut, with 6,000 more planned cuts by year's end. Company insiders complained of the cuts, and also detailed a variety of company cuts at headquarters, such as removing fluorescent light bulbs in overhead lighting fixtures, setting the thermostat higher to reduce air- conditioning demands and reducing security guards. In March 2000, Lucent announced plans to spin off its business communications syst