Microsoft Layoffs 'Sign of Healthy Leadership,' While HPE Cuts Too

Microsoft layoffs are impacting workers across its business as it enters its new fiscal year.

Also in the channel, HPE is cutting 146 workers in Massachusetts while unifying its SimpliVity and Nimble dHCI research and development.

We couldn’t reach Microsoft to find out which workers have been impacted, their numbers and locations. A Business Insider story earlier reported that the Microsoft layoffs affected fewer than 1,000 jobs.

The company cut roles at its online news portal, MSN.com, as it shifted to an AI-powered algorithmic feed, according to the report. It also made cuts in the Microsoft Azure cloud division.

And last month, it closed all Microsoft Stores, as it shifts its retail investments to digital channels.

Layoffs Not a Bad Sign?

Brian Washburn, an analyst with Omdia, said of the Microsoft job cuts, “that’s not an adjustment for a 150,000-sized workforce.”

Jay McBain is Forrester’s principal analyst of channel partnerships and alliances. He doesn’t read much into Microsoft or HPE, or others making “small and selective” changes to talent.

Forrester’s Jay McBain

“If you look at their hiring, it probably balances out and realigns them for future market opportunities,” he said. “It is a sign of healthy leadership that is always looking to make small course corrections across a massive portfolio of products and services.”

HPE said businesses have been accepting hyperconverged infrastructure (HCI) for general purpose applications and small deployments. These organizations are now looking to expand the HCI experience to new use cases. That includes edge environments, business-critical applications and mixed-workloads.

HPE is realigning its HCI strategy to focus HPE SimpliVity for general purpose, SMBs and the enterprise edge. Enterprise and midmarket businesses are the targets for HPE Nimble Storage dHCI.

Unifying its R&D strategy for both Nimble Storage dHCI and HCI will allow customers to “benefit from a consistent and better experience across hybrid cloud, AIOps, support, automation and life cycle management for all of their HCI use cases,” it said. As part of this plan, there will be a reduction in the HPE HCI headcount, it said.