Updated Hitachi Vantara is making ‘significant’ workforce reductions, in response to a tough enterprise storage market. The layoffs could number 1500 staff – more than 10 per cent of the payroll – sources have told us, and are part of a move to cut expenses by $200m a year, according to a person familiar with the company.
The Layoff.com is running an active thread for Hitachi Vantara staff to discuss the job cuts. One poster wrote: “Several sources have confirmed that layoffs are coming next week in the marketing org. Managers were asked to cut 15% from their budgets, including headcount, several weeks ago and submit their plans for approval.”
Hitachi Vantara declined to discuss budget cuts but confirmed in a statement to Blocks & Files that is making an unspecified number of layoffs.
A spokesperson said: “Yes, a reduction in force is occurring,” but the rumoured 1500 number is wrong: “We can confirm that this is absolutely not correct. The reduction in force is substantially less than 1,500.”
“As you will have noted from our recent integration with Hitachi Consulting and the acquisition of Waterline Data [in January 2020], Hitachi Vantara is transforming into a new kind of digital infrastructure and solutions company. We are now simultaneously operating in the fast growth data management and analytics market and the mature global data storage market. The global storage market is currently delivering only modest growth – a trend many of our competitors have also noted.”
“Like many of our industry peers, we have had to make some tough decisions to simplify and streamline our operations, improve our financial performance and position ourselves for long-term success – this includes headcount reductions to optimize our organization.
“We do not make decisions that affect our people and teams lightly, but we believe these moves are important to accelerate our transformation and growth and we thank the employees who are leaving us for their valuable contributions to the growth and evolution of our business.
“We remain optimistic that we can take share from our storage competitors with the recent introduction of the Hitachi VSP 5000 – the world’s fastest and most reliable data storage array. Initial customer response to the VSP 5000 has already surpassed expectations and we have other exciting innovations in the pipeline for 2020.”
In September 2018 the enterprise storage giant said it had 7000 employees. In January 2020 the company merged with Hitachi Consulting, which had 6500 employees in 2015 (the most recent year we found figures for).
