Quantum to cut 180 staff

Storage giant becomes the latest vendor to wield the axe

Storage vendor Quantum is trimming its global workforce by approximately 8 per cent as part of a cost cutting drive designed to save it $18m (£12m) annually.

The backup, recovery and archive specialist said the restructuring is in response to the “global financial crisis” and would result in around 180 job losses.

However, the vendor stressed it would continue to pour investment into growth opportunities – namely around its data deduplication, replication and DXi-Series disk backup technology.

Rick Belluzzo, chief executive of Quantum, said in a statement: “The expense reductions we are making are intended to provide additional operating margin and incremental EBITDA growth as we confront the challenges posed by the current macroeconomic environment.

“Despite these challenges, we remain in compliance with all our debt covenants and expect to be in compliance for the next twelve months. In addition, we continue to see strong demand for our branded DXi(TM) products and are excited about partnering with EMC and Dell to develop a common architecture that leverages our deduplication and replication software and provides customers with even greater flexibility.”

Quantum expects to take a hit of around $4.4m from the changes.