Kaseya: Layoffs part of restructure, not scale-back

Responding to a scathing tweet, Kaseya lays out restructure plans

Kaseya has hit back at claims it has "laid off the majority" of its research and development (R&D) team, insisting that although it has made some layoffs across the company, it has hired nearly as many.

Over the weekend, the vendor came under fire from a Twitter user accusing the company of cutting up to 40 members of staff from the R&D unit. However, talking to CRN, CEO of Kaseya Fred Voccola said this was not the case.

Some 40 jobs were cut from the firm last week - but they were mainly from the sales and marketing department, he said, adding that 35 new staff were brought in across the company, meaning the actual number cut was really just five.

He added that eventually Kaseya's headcount will increase by another 25. The restructure is a result of the vendor moving to a pan-European and pan-Asia-Pacific model from its previous country-by-country model, which it claims will make it more flexible in how it approaches those markets.

Currently, the remote management software provider employs more than 300 people globally, with 115 people in its R&D department.

The accusatory tweet from Twitter user @scottgala said: "Do people know that you laid off the majority of your R&D team, and that no new products are coming out. #SinkingShip"

A small portion of the 40 staff let go did come from the R&D department as certain projects came to an end, Voccola said. He added that there were plans to hire more developers in certain tech fields, but after taking customer feedback about the sorts of tech areas they were hiring in, he halted the process.

"We shifted some of the hires and cancelled some of the requisitions that were on products that we felt the customer didn't want," he said. "We spent a lot of time in the last couple of months really finding out what the customers wanted.

"One thing Kaseya did not do a good job of [in the past] was just that: ‘shut up and listen'. Now we know what they want. We have plans to hire a certain number of developers. We did eliminate some of those requisitions but we opened up different ones and made those changes.

"We are paying a lot of recruiters a lot of money to hire a lot of people," Voccola concluded.

The disgruntled Twitter user also claimed there were no new products coming out of Kaseya, something the company's CTO Dana Epp quashed in reply.

"In fact @scottgala, you'll see more product get delivered by @Kaseyacorp to customers in the next couple of releases than in the past 2 yrs."

".@scottgala With the R&D changes complete we've doubled the dev resources on our solutions for MSPs. Including hiring more PMs. #razorfocus," he said.