RESEARCH TRIANGLE PARK – NetApp will be laying off several hundred workers – some 5.5% of its global workforce – as part of a “srategic alignment,” CEO George Kurian told Wall Street analysts in a conference call Wednesday evening. Where the layoffs will take place remains unclear although the bulk of the cuts will hit employees acquired through an acquisition made in Colorado.
NetApp maintains a large campus in RTP.
“These headcount reductions are never easy to make, and we take care and consideration when we decide to make those changes,” Kurian said.
“Those changes were driven by the strategic alignment and focus that we have to prioritize our resources in the core storage systems and software business as well as accelerating our public cloud services business. We realigned about 5.5% of our workforce, and those were in parts of the business – in all the functions of the business, but in those parts of the business that were not particularly aligned to our go-forward priorities.”
Kurian did confirm earlier reports that its SolidFire, which NetApp acquired in 2016, is taking the brunt of the hits.
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“SolidFire, yes, I can confirm was part of the team impacted. We are narrowing our focus with a SolidFire and HCI [hyper converged infrastructure for cloud computing] portfolio to the high-margin parts of the market as we have signaled on prior calls,” he explained according to a transcript of the call.
The company, which focuses on data storage and cloud computing, has some 10,000 workers.
NetApp reported strong financial results, beating analysts’ expectations on earnings by a whopping 33 cents at 73 cents per share.
However, Kurian is cautious about the near-term future, citing in part the ongoing economic impact of the COVID-19 pandemic.
“With regard to the revenue picture, I think we’re just communicating that we’re taking it a quarter at a time,” he said.
“It’s a volatile environment. We’ve had a good start to the year, and we don’t — we’re not clear whether the traditional sequential seasonality patterns apply right now. So what I’ll tell you is we’re not guiding a full year. We’re giving you the best outlook we see, and we’re being cautious, right? That’s really the summary.”
NetApp, which has big presence in RTP, is cutting hundreds of jobs
