HPE plans to cut 5000 staff in streamlining effort
Fri 22 Sep 2017
Hewlett Packard Enterprise (HPE) is intending to cut around 5000 staff, according to sources close to the matter.
Staff cuts to that extent would amount to about 10% of the company’s 50,000-strong workforce. Sources speaking to Bloomberg state that the reductions are part of a general move to reduce expenses as competition grows for the company and it looks to shift its focus towards enterprise IT.
It is understood that the cuts will begin before the end of the year, and are likely to affect workers both in the U.S. and abroad. It is also reported that this will include management staff.
HPE CEO Meg Whitman recently spoke to analysts on a call and discussed the strategy going forward. She stated that the while the company is seeing increased demand in a number of key areas across the business, she also noted that there are plans to remove ‘layers’ within the organisation to cut costs and improve efficiency.
The company has been going through a streamlining process since 2015. Divisions that it has removed include PCs, printers, software units and business services. The ultimate aim of HPE is to bring the company into the modern IT industry, and therefore be able to respond to the advancements of massive cloud providers such as AWS, Microsoft Azure, and Google Cloud Platform.
On the analyst conference call, Whitman spoke of the advantages of a streamlined structure, saying: “With fewer lines of business and clear strategic priorities, we have the opportunity to create an internal structure and operating model that is simpler, nimbler and faster.”
According to HPE CFO Tim Stonesifer, the company is looking to make $1.5 billion (approx. £1.1 billion) in savings across a three-year timescale.
The California-based firm has recently made a number of forays into developing a hybrid cloud offering, with the release of its Gen10 suite of hybrid cloud services and the acquisition of Cloud Technology Partners.
