HPE Cutting Hundreds of Jobs Due to COVID-19 Pandemic

HPE reportedly is cutting hundreds of sales jobs in a major sales reorganization.

This comes after the company cut 146 workers in Massachusetts this summer while unifying its SimpliVity and Nimble dHCI research and development units.

According to Blocks & Files, HPE now is laying off at least 500 staff. The HPE sales jobs are in the server, storage, networking and PointNext teams. The workers got termination notices starting Oct. 19.

Employees in this latest round include sales account managers, enterprise account managers and country account managers.

According to Blocks & Files, HPE is laying off entire external sales teams in response to COVID-19. The pandemic has reduced the need for in-person sales calls. HPE now is focusing more on inside sales.

When we reached out, an HPE spokesperson said the company is focusing its investments and realigning its workforce to “critical core businesses and areas of growth that will accelerate our strategy.”

“We are committed to making these necessary changes with empathy and transparency, and ensuring impacted team members receive the support they need,” the spokesperson said. “These actions will enable us to become a more agile organization and advance our strategy to deliver everything as a service from edge to cloud so that we can help our customers and partners adapt to a new business environment and harness the power of their data wherever it lives.”

At last count, HPE’s workforce totaled about 60,000.

For its fiscal third quarter, HPE reported $6.8 billion in net revenue. That’s down 6% from the year-ago quarter. However, analysts expected $6.06 billion.

Gross profit was $2.1 billion, up 8% from the second quarter due to “strong operation execution.”