HPE SimpliVity 146 Layoffs Confirmed: WARN Notice

The cutbacks come a little more than three years after HPE paid $650 million for the one-time hyperconverged upstart that attracted widespread attention for its robust backup and disaster recovery capabilities.

Hewlett Packard Enterprise has laid off 146 employees at its SimpliVity hyperconverged business unit in Westborough, Mass., according to a WARN notice report newly filed in Massachusetts.

The WARN notice -- which was received July 14 -- said the layoffs will go into effect the week of July 24.

The WARN notice is required by the federal government as part of the Worker Adjustment and Retraining Notification (WARN) Act. That 1988 federal law ensures advance notice in cases of qualified plant closings and mass layoffs.

CRN reported Thursday that HPE had laid off a significant number of its original SimpliVity development team as part of a move to “accelerate innovation” by unifying hyperconverged research and development across SimpliVity and Nimble Storage dHCI. At that time, HPE did not disclose how many employees had been laid off.

“Unifying our R&D strategy for both HPE Nimble Storage dHCI and HCI (hyperconverged infrastrcutre) will allow customers to benefit from a consistent and better experience across hybrid cloud, AIOps, support, automation, and lifecycle management for all of their HCI use cases,” said HPE in a statement provided to CRN. “As part of this plan, there will be a reduction in the HPE HCI headcount, but we’re not disclosing the number of impacted team members.”

As to whether the Westborough, Mass. office will be closed, HPE said that it is “continually evaluating” its “real estate site strategy.”

HPE SimpliVity development team members were informed of the cutback in a conference call on July 13 with HPE Vice President and General Manager Hyperconverged Infrastructure Patrick Osborne and HPE Vice President of Hyper-Converged Engineering Joshua Dion, sources said.

The cutbacks come a little more than three years after HPE paid $650 million for the one time hyperconverged upstart that attracted widespread attention for its robust backup and disaster recovery capabilities. After the deal closed, HPE maintained the Westborough, Mass. location and retained the SimpliVity development team.

HPE SimpliVity and Nimble dHCI- which are both 100 percent channel sales offerings- have been hot sellers for partners who are seeing strong growth in the hyperconverged market. The HPE hyperonverged business is a $1 billion plus business.

HPE is moving some SimpliVity support and development to Bangalore, India, sources told CRN. HPE declined to comment on the matter.

HPE said its unified hyperconverged infrastructure plan comes as the company is moving quickly to “capitalize on key areas of market growth” as customers increasingly moving to edge platforms and disaggregated HCI.

“Organizations are now looking to expand the HCI experience to new use cases – including edge environments, business-critical applications, and mixed-workloads at scale - driving a need to evolve HCI to meet two new needs: Edge-Optimized HCI and Disaggregated HCI,” said HPE.

With HPE “concentrating” hyperconverged resources, the company said it is “re-aligning its HCI strategy to focus HPE SimpliVity for general purpose, small and medium-sized businesses, as well as the enterprise edge, and the HPE Nimble Storage dHCI solution for enterprises’ and mid-market businesses’ disaggregated HCI needs for business-critical applications and mixed workloads at scale.”

Separately, HPE announced this week that it had launched and priced a $1 billion offering of 1.45 percent notes due April 2024 and $750 million of 1.75 percent notes due April 2026.

Among the underwriters are Citigroup Global Markets Inc., Deutsche Bank Securities Inc., HSBC Securities (USA) Inc. and Wells Fargo Securities, LLC.