Narayan AmmachchiAmerican IT, technology, and enterprise solutions provider Hewlett Packard Enterprise (HPE) has reportedly laid off an undisclosed number of employees in the United States, as the firm struggles to gain a foothold in the cloud services business.
Although HPE has confirmed the report, it has not yet disclosed the precise number of employees it removed.
“Workforce changes are part of a company-wide strategy to give HPE the needed workforce to be a more nimble customer and partner-centric company,” HPE spokeswoman Meghan Fintland told Geekwire.
Moreover, the company has attributed the latest layoff to its previously announced restructuring plans.
The news comes barely weeks after its hardware unit, HP Inc, disclosed plans to reduce its workforce by 3,000 and outsource an additional 1,000 jobs to third-party service providers.
According to Geekwire, HPE is all set to sell Stackato – a unit whose service helps developers create apps for private hybrid or public clouds – to Germany’s SUSE.
Some employees have taken to social media to vent their anger and disappointment. HPE senior engineering manager Vicky Brasseur tweeted: “Today I laid off my entire team. I’m completely gutted. They’re the best with whom I’ve ever worked.”
Hewlett Packard’s service business has been shrinking in recent months: It merged its software business to UK-based Micro Focus last month, and shut down its public cloud division, the HP Helion Cloud.
Now the company is talking of refocusing most of its resources on scaling up its core data center businesses and looking for more contracts in hybrid cloud market.
But freeing up more cash to ramp up operation will still remain a challenge. In last week’s analyst meeting, the company revealed that it would have to pay $2.5 billion into a pension fund for workers of its services business.
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