SCC says first sales redundancies in 10 years reflect cloud shift

Reseller and services firm lets small handful of hardware specialists go as it ploughs on with shift to services

SCC has let a handful of staff go in the first round of sales redundancies in a decade as it continues to focus on cloud offerings.

The channel giant employs more than 2,500 people in total, but recently let nine staff go, the firm's managing director for UK sales John Bland confirmed to CRN. Rumours initially suggested 20 staff had been axed, but Bland quashed these claims.

Six of the nine affected were technical account managers (TAMs) across three departments, who all specialised in hardware, he said.

Bland told CRN they were let go "because we are shifting so quickly to services, and these guys were specialists in hardware".

He added: "So I've got 30 pre-sales guys in services, and six TAMs who sell tin. Frankly, a lot of the sales guys were using the presales people, not the TAMs. So really, that role in the sector became redundant. I hate doing these things but, you know what's happening in the market, we are increasing our cloud capability massively and these guys were good at configuring [hardware]."

Bland insisted the move is not part of a wider restructure which will affect any other staff.

"I'm not making anyone else redundant and the reason this has been such a big story internally is because for 10 years I have run the sales team and we haven't done redundancies," he said. "Any other companies make redundancies a lot, and we don't at SCC."