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HPE's started firing people at Simplivity, say former employees

Sales, marketing and product management people relieved of their duties, livelihoods

HPE looks to have started writing pink slips for Simplivity people.

The Register has heard from former-as-of-last-week regional sales manager at Simplivity who tells us that folks in marketing, channel, finance and inside sales have all been shown the door.

Our source says plenty of sales engineering and outside sales people have also been let go and says ““The reason I know this is because my entire team was eliminated on Friday, including myself.”

Crowdsourced gossip clearinghouse The Layoff.com offers a similar report, with an anonymous writer reporting 70-100 “marketing, product management, and field sales among other groups” have been shown the exit. Our source and The Layoff each refer to offices in different parts of the United States, so we're assuming the layoffs are widespread.

HPE announced it would acquire Simplivity in mid-January 2017 and The Register understands the transaction closed on February 17th. HPE's since said it will offer Simplivity's OmniStack software for its own ProLiant servers, for a planned May release.

If the reports are correct, they are unsurprising as HPE has its own sales force and marketing teams and they aren't doing brilliantly if last quarter's results are any guide. Those results also showed marked declines in server and storage revenue. That's excusable given that hyperconverged kit like Simplivity's is expected to replace plenty of standalone purchases and represent a rare bright spot for on-premises hardware sales. That argument may, however, be starting to fray as Cisco recently pointed to disappointing sales in the category.

The Register has requested verification of the layoffs from HPE and Simplivity representatives, but neither have replied to our queries at the time of writing. Which in the case of our calls to Simplivity people might represent de facto confirmation of the situation. ®

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