Tuesday 13 January 2009

Job Losses: EMC Joins The Club

EMC have finally announced that they will be following the industry trend and cutting staff. Approximately 7% (2400) of the workforce will go. The cuts are widely reported (here for instance) and at their earliest were forecast by Stephen Foskett in his December post.

Have a look at this list of tech layoffs. Those storage related are Seagate, Dell, EMC, WD, Pillar Data, Sun, SanDisk, HP. Not on the list are Quantum and COPAN.

Do you know of any others?

2009 will be the year of rationalisation and optimisation. The only prediction to make for the next 12 months is that end-users will be looking to do more with less.

5 comments:

Unknown said...

Doing more with less? Wasn't that the slogan in the storage industry for 2001?

Stephen said...

Hi Chris. You have been busy haven't you? I have been "away" for the last six months. I searched your site trying to find the goss on Copan but its not there. The only posting I could find relating to Copans woes was in the register.

I am trying to keep HDS and Cisco in business but our finance people are not interested. Times are very tuff indeed.

marcfarley said...

More with less.... its hard to squeeze water from a rock, but that's work in 2009. So far (fingers crossed) 3PAR has not had layoffs. We might be able to get by without any because our thin technology is appealing to people who are budget-squeezed.

Stephen Foskett said...

It's a crying shame that good folks are out of a job. I've heard conflicting information from insiders about how the companies are handling it, but I know one thing for sure: This is a small industry. No one (employer or employee) should burn bridges at times like these, since we'll all meet again when the carousel comes around!

Devang Panchigar said...

These tough times are quite necessary.

As good times come in, expansion takes place (uncontrolled). Things like systems, storage, employees, just grow by the day may be by the hour sometimes, i have spoken to customers in the past where they have used 60TB of space on DMX4 infrastructure in a week.....no body cared or bothered if it was really consumed, sys admins demanded space, storage admins allocated space, no questions asked.

With times like these, people or rather management goes through consolidation process to figure out what has worked and what has not worked from their good times acquisitions. This is where a lot of changes happen. Controlled growth is put in place, corners are trimmed to save every penny and dime.

I personally think, based on the current financial markets, we will probably continue through a slump in 09 and the first half of 2010.

It is truly tough times....I agree with Foskett, we should keep the bridges on, its a small community of storage guys through out the world and everyone knows each other.