Veritas lays off a third of its sales staff – merry Christmas, everyone! Veritas has axed 30 percent of its sales staff in the US and Europe, The Register has learned. The data security biz was spun out of Symantec and entered private ownership just after the turn of the year. The company is based in Mountain View, California, and employs about 7,000 people. We asked Veritas about this festival …
Except, I believe they didn't follow a calendar year IIRC, their year end was like Jan or Feb or March... As such, they could of laid folks off in Jan 1st, instead they are soul-less douches.
Veritas as I've seen also has changed sales, to be more compliance nazi's, rather than selling on their what I thought was a pretty good product. I hear all about various "assessments," which are really audit's and true-ups.
"Veritas as I've seen also has changed sales, to be more compliance nazi's, rather than selling on their what I thought was a pretty good product. I hear all about various "assessments," which are really audit's and true-ups."
Time to get off and find another option. It is owned by a PE firm now. They have zero interest in being a tech company. Their goal will be to wring every cent/pence of profit out of the company while doing as little as possible in the way of investment. It is like Infor, owned by Golden Gate Capital, on the applications side... as soon as they move in, you should make plans to move off because it is going to get worse before it gets worse.
Software and support have to be paid for. If you want freeware then go and use that to run your business. Don't complain when you run a commercial software product that is not freeware and you are expected to pay for it. My experiance on this is that customers have for to long overlooked the agreement they entered into when purchasing software that is licenced on a trust basis. They, or their staff, only seem to have a negative comment to make towards a software vendor who has decided to verify their consumption of that software against their entitlement when they are presented with a bill for their overconsumption. As a business it is your responsibility to ensure you are correctly licenced, it states so quiet clearly in the EULA, and if you have not bothered to ensure you are using the software in line with the licence agreement you signed up to then that cannot be the software vendors issue when they call you to to account.
I take it you've never been made redundant then in your entire career? If so then you've been very lucky. Every redundancy I've been through, luckily only 5 over 25 years, has always been in Oct, Nov or early Dec. They give you notice to work 1 or 3 months, pay you your big wedge pay-off and when New Year comes you've got a big wedge in your back pocket and a month or two to find a new job. It's actually not as bad as it sounds, sure you have the pain of doing interviews and having to run around to places to secure a job but it's just part of modern life I'm afraid, there are no jobs for life anymore.
I feel for people, I really do and I hate the uncertainty that builds up as you wait to see if your job is being scrapped, then the worry, it's one of the worst things to go through especially if you have a family like most of us do. I assume the US system is like the UK, you will get a pay off to keep you going for a couple of months to give you a chance to find a new job. Most people work hard, have a good reputation and always manage to secure something. We all think there's 3 jobs out there in our field but there's always work, you may have to quickly (re)learn a skill set and make a compromise to get some cash into your house but there's always something out there that a flexible IT worker can turn their hand to to get a job. I took a 35% pay cut once to make sure I had some cash coming in while I spent time trying to find a good job and get myself back up to the pay I really wanted, 4 months of cutting household bills to the bone and a baby on the way, nightmare time but I survived and it only took me 9 months to finally get the job that got me back up to the pay rate I really wanted.
"I assume the US system is like the UK, you will get a pay off..."
You assume wrong. In the vast majority of cases in the US you will get 2 weeks severance. If the company is feeling generous you may get one week's pay per year of service. If they are not feeling generous you will get your accumulated holiday pay, minus taxes. If you are really unlucky, you get nothing and your last pay check/cheque bounces leaving you liable for the bank charges and the unpaid taxes/social security/medicare (happened to me).
Only senior people (VP and above) will actually get anything meaningful and generous for severance as in the rest of the world.
Oh. and there's no automatic right for unemployment benefit, and in most cases there's a maximum time limit for claiming.
The US is a great place to live and work when things are going well, but it's brutal when they are not.
That's true. That is a terrible move for their employees.... Hilarious how they are trying to spin this too, as though they are positioning Veritas for future growth... by getting rid of a bunch of customer facing people. What is really going on here is that a PE firm bought a legacy software company, they are going to cut everything and very profitably squeeze the company to death over a decade. It is a glitch in the software business model, CA and Infor have already discovered it and now the PE firms are on to it. You can buy a legacy software company with a river of cash coming in for support. If you just cut everything and do a minimal job of support, all that support stream cash is nearly pure profit. Yes, customers will get pissed off that their support is terrible and the product isn't being improved, but big companies move slowly... it will take them years to move off if ever. By the time they finally get off, the PE firm has made a large ROI on buying Veritas.
Have we suddenly become part of the Empire of Trump? Aren't 'pink slips' a USA only thing?
P45's here in the UK.
Tis the season to be jolly
but you can't have any lolly
Here's your P.45
Don't drink and drive
Obviously windows 10 isn't either 1) selling or 2) needs a the POS that Symantec sells.
I think Symantec saw the writing on the wall that back-ups and archive are moving in the cloud direction in years to come... might as well sell it off now while it has value before everyone else figures out that people aren't going to be doing on prem back ups in the near to intermediate future. AWS, Google Cloud Platform... they just give away storage.
Same shit management as when it was Symantec so nothing will change until that does - the only hope for Veritas is to sack the "top" 30% of the company and start again. I would suggest dumping every SVP and most of the VP's as they are pretty much all a waste of oxygen - they strangled the company before and will continue to do so for as long as they are allowed.
Look at the difference Blue Coat has made to Symantec - finally someone had the balls to make the difficult decision and dump all the old, dead wood and bring in new blood. As a result there is a new found energy and belief within Symantec with employees, partners and customers genuinely excited for the future.
Compare that to Veritas and it isn't hard to see the difference.
I would suggest dumping every SVP and most of the VP's as they are pretty much all a waste of oxygen
That won't happen as the job of management is protect management and their bonuses.
As for here.. at least it's sales droids and the not the techies in the trenches. Usually it seems to be the other way around.
Disk management software now irrelevant since its built into the os.
Disk backup software that takes over a year to come to market after a new os version comes out, and even then won't restore data fully, and requires new patches be applied on a weekly basis.
Go home Veritas - you're shit.
A PE company bought Veritas and is mainly looking to recover the cost as fast as possible.
Existing maintenance will pay that bill in a couple of years and then it's pure profit.
You don't need as many sales reps to collect maintenance given they aren't able to win new business with legacy software. Cut the costs to the bone and keep the profits up.
Kill engineering and development, shrink the support staff too.
Novell anyone?
..or should be, for people that make these decisions. And hopefully a pretty special place too for those that craft these mealy-mouthed communications justifying this odious behavior with statements full of whatever the most popular buzzwords are at the time.
Always the same I'm afraid.
Do next year's budgets in October; discover the business doesn't have the overhead cover next year to support the existing workforce; quick exercise on who's going and who's staying; hand out the P45's - then "Oh look, it's the week before Christmas - just like it was last year".
It sucks, but at least those left do have a business next year; if you don't do this when you need to, everyone goes.
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