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Sun Microsystems, 6000 job cuts and reorganises business

WebWolf   on 16 November 2008 - 16:17 · 12 comments & 5033 views

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It seems that we only saw a part of the massive job cuts in the IT industry recently. Sun Microsystems released a statement for the press about their plans for adjusting to the "economical climate" and maximizing their incomes.

As it often occurs these days, the work force is the first that feels the crunch. Sun Microsystems plans to release 6000 workers. That is about 15-18% of their global workforce. Among those people is Rich Green, the Sun vice-president of software operations. Earlier this year, Sun cut 2500 people. Sun Microsystems recently filed a net loss of 1.7 billion dollars, and a drop of 7% each year.

The amount of money that Sun is going to save using the plan developed by the board of directors is between $700 and $800 million annually. Workforce cuts are integrated in that number by $500-$600 million.

The plan also includes some optimistic highlights, and aims that the company will target in the future. This should be achieved by forming two new business groups and a new group within Sun's existing systems business:

Application Platform Software - Will work on Sun's open source software for desktop, server and handheld devices, MySQL open source database products and GlassFish application server. In addition, this division will be responsible for Sun Learning services.

System Platforms - Will be lead by John Fowler, executive vice president. This will be the division responsible for Solaris, Virtualization (xVM and VirtualBox).

Cloud Computing & Developer Platforms - Responsible for implementing new technologies into all segments and following new trends. Dave Douglas, Senior Vice-president will be in charge of this group.

Post a comment · Send to friend Comments · There are 12 additional comments
(2 replies) #1 thealexweb on 16 Nov 2008 - 16:25
Fires or made redundant, there's a big difference.
#1.1 kaiwai on 16 Nov 2008 - 20:33
thealexweb said,
Fires or made redundant, there's a big difference.


You're right - but then again, using 'fired' apparently gets the head lines and traffic more than 'redundancy'.

Regarding the new structure - its good to see they've finally simplified it. Sun had the structure for a company the size of IBM, and SUN is most certainly not the size of IBM!
#1.2 Marshalus on 17 Nov 2008 - 16:12
Maybe in the UK, but in the states its all about the same.
(3 replies) #2 skynetXrules on 16 Nov 2008 - 17:24
wouldnt all those job cuts just make the economy just worse

because of more people would be with less money because jobless state
#2.1 Johnston on 16 Nov 2008 - 17:34
It would make the economy worse, but the company will become more profitable, which is all they care about. It's up to the gov't to sort out the economy
#2.2 kaiwai on 16 Nov 2008 - 20:31
Johnston said,
It would make the economy worse, but the company will become more profitable, which is all they care about. It's up to the gov't to sort out the economy


So according to your logic, its better for a company to go bankrupt than shed a few jobs.

Clue to the clueless - look at their profit - THEY HAVE MADE NO PROFIT!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
#2.3 skynetXrules on 16 Nov 2008 - 21:16
kaiwai said,
So according to your logic, its better for a company to go bankrupt than shed a few jobs.

Clue to the clueless - look at their profit - THEY HAVE MADE NO PROFIT!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!


who am i suppose to know if i didn't ask
#3 +Chicane-UK on 16 Nov 2008 - 22:37
Just hope it doesn't make their aftersales support any more useless. It already takes days / weeks to turn around urgent warranty calls on our Sun servers whereas HP turn around warranty stuff SAME DAY. And they cost less...
#4 Hills420 on 17 Nov 2008 - 00:04
Which of these three groups is responsible for hardware? I heard a rumor they were exiting the hardware market and conforming to a pure software company.

Hmmmmm.........
#5 Shiranui on 17 Nov 2008 - 00:53
I'm just glad they started installing all JRE updates into the same directory now.
#6 cork1958 on 17 Nov 2008 - 02:13
Not that I care for Suns products at all, especially that POS, JRE, but definitely not cool to see any job losses anywhere.
#7 badblood on 17 Nov 2008 - 09:00
From my experience with Sun hardware, I'm not surprised they are not making a profit. It's all proprietry stuff that you can only get from Sun and it costs more than standard server hardware from Dell/HP/Fujitsu/IBM etc.

But I sympathise with anyone who gets made redundant as I was involved in the telecomms slump in 2001/2002, being made redundant from Nortel Networks. So I know it's not a nice thing to happen to anyone.

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