OpenStack Layoffs at HPE, Mirantis Not Indicative of Open Source Trouble, Foundation Says

Nearly a year after HP split into two companies, Hewlett Packard Enterprise – the company focused on selling servers, software, storage, networking and other services – has laid off a significant number of OpenStack employees, according to a report Tuesday by Network World.

According to the report, HPE is not alone in having cut OpenStack employees in recent weeks. Mirantis has also laid off around 100 OpenStack developers, Mirantis co-founder and chief marketing officer Boris Renski said. The cuts happened after the company acquired TCP Cloud.

The OpenStack Foundation says the cuts are not indicative of trouble with the open source community. A recent report by 451 Research said that OpenStack deployments are growing and are being used for more mission critical, enterprise workloads.

While earlier reports suggest that HPE cut all of its OpenStack employees, spokesperson Erik Denny told Network World that this was incorrect, and that the company still employs OpenStack technical experts.

The report, which cites an anonymous source close to HPE, says that since the Micro Focus deal was announced, workers in HPE’s PaaS and IaaS cloud business have been laid off. It is rumored that HPE may sell its OpenStack Helion software assets but continue to white-label market them, Network World said.