Sun comments on HPC sales team growth in face of layoffs

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On Monday I commented on a post on Marc Hamilton’s blog in which he outlined a reorganization in the HPC sales organization to focus on that area as a growth activity. From Marc’s post

Sun logoNow we’ve put together a global HPC Sales team to help bring Sun Constellation System to an event broader set of commercial, education, and research HPC customers, and I’m really excited to be leading that new team.

insideHPC’s readers are the best in the business, and they wrote in with their observations that they aren’t see growth at Sun or HPC; in fact, a couple readers observed that some of the HPC sales teams they are working with have been cut. Why the difference?

I sent an email to Marc to ask him what was going on, and how his statement squared with your observations in the field. This is what he had to say in an email back to me.

As part of the restructuring announced last November by Jonathan, the company is doing a significant Reduction in Force (RIF), the timing of which is based on many factors including local country employment rules, and various other business factors. In the North America Sales organization, many of the RIFs occurred last week. It would not be appropriate for me to comment further on details of what roles or positions where impacted in North America.

Specifically to focus on HPC Sales, and our vision of being the leading HPC infrastructure provider by delivering differentiated customer value in balanced HPC systems, including compute, storage, and networking, we have created a new global HPC Sales team which will include dedicated HPC salespeople, HPC systems engineers, and HPC experienced program managers. The new team is chartered not only to sell “superscale” HPC systems in the Edu/Research space (typically large deals > $10M in value) but also large commercial HPC deals (typically in the $1M+ range). The staffing for my new team is coming both from current HPC staff at Sun that previously reported to a number of different sales organizations, and selective new hiring. Most of the hiring we are doing today is in our “emerging markets” geography which includes India, China, Latin America, and Eastern Europe/Middle East/Africa. I also expect some new HPC sales positions will be created in Asia Pacific and in Europe as we work through the restructuring in those geographies.

We will be talking publically a lot more about our newest HPC products at the upcoming April 14 Open Network Systems launch, you get more info on this launch here: http://www.sun.com/launch and at the launch we will be announcing a number of new superscale HPC wins from around the world!

Comments

  1. Dunno about the rest of the world, but Sun have been headhunting like mad down here in Australia for their HPC team here.. I think they ended up having to import people due to the skills shortage.