Poor Q2 sparks Sybase job cuts

Sybase will cut its workforce by 10 per cent in the coming weeks after showing a pre-tax Q2 loss of $20 million.

Shares in the database company fell more than $2 as Wall Street reacted badly to the announcement.

Phil Robinson, marketing director at Sybase UK, said that the company had grown its cost base over the past two quarters. 'The issues are operating issues rather than product based,' he said. 'We now need to make sure that our sales and marketing deliver.'

There are likely to be job cuts in Europe but the company would not say where they would fall.

Barbara Stanley, marketing manager at Informix UK, said her company was not gloating over Sybase's position. 'We're not experiencing the same problems,' she said. 'We're very focused on our market. Sybase didn't have a coherent strategy for its acquisitions and has made no attempt to integrate them.'

She said that Microsoft had had its effect on the enterprise market.

'We have our technology focused on that market and we're not complacent about MS,' she said.

Sybase will roll out a fresh corporate strategy over the coming weeks.

'We'll roll out our new corporate positioning of the whole of Sybase rather than the different product areas,' said Robinson.

He denied that Sybase would drop its database and become just a middleware company. 'Middleware and desktop tools are big business for us and we saw strong demand for professional services and consulting in the second quarter,' he said.

'The UK has built a $1 million business for Internet services in the past few months and data warehousing has also been buoyant for us.'