Brocade staff face job cuts
Vendor to axe nine per cent of its workforce
Network storage vendor Brocade has announced it plans to cut 110 jobs, or nine per cent of its total workforce.
The move was announced along with the company's second-quarter figures.
Turnover for Q2 2004 was $145.6m, a slight increase on $145m in Q1 and an increase of 11 per cent on the $131m reported in Q2 2003. Net loss for Q2 2004 was $2m, compared with net loss for Q1 of $36.8m and net loss for Q2 2003 of $146m.
"The workforce reduction was planned after an analysis of all company operations, conducted by internal teams in each department," said Tom Buiocchi, Brocade's vice-president of marketing and support. "It really is all about operational efficiency."
He added that no change was expected in relationships with Brocade's channel partners.
"Brocade historically sees most of its sales flow through its OEM partners and the OEMs' reseller and integrator channels. We will continue to support this model," he said.
But Adriaan Serfontein, chief technology architect at storage reseller Posetiv, said high-end Fibre Channel (FC) switch vendors such as Brocade are under pressure because of iSCSI and Cisco's arrival in the market.
"iSCSI has knocked the guts out of the FC switch market," he said.
Brocade will take a restructuring charge of $10.5m in this quarter for the redundancies. Buiocchi declined to say which departments would be affected or when the cuts would be made.