Employees hate to hear the dreaded "restructure" word coming from a CEO because it's almost always synonymous with layoffs. By now, those at Hewlett-Packard must really despise it.
HP's current effort to breathe life into its Enterprise Systems (ES) business has already resulted in 3,900 pink slips, with more to come, reported our sister site, The VAR Guy.
In HP’s FQ3 2015, sales in the ES unit fell 11 percent to $4.9 billion, triggering this latest round of layoffs. The company recently completed a step in restructuring that involved the division of its internal systems which will allow its PCs and printers business to operate separately from its enterprise business.
The recent string of layoffs is part of the company's long-running plan that began in 2012 with a possible 25,000 jobs on the chopping block that turned into 55,000, and now may exceed that number as well. HP's CFO Cathie Lesjak says the company will cut up to an additional 5 percent more people from its workforce than it had originally planned.
Although HP "terminated" those affected by the separation, it's not completely bad news for some employees. Taking a page from its 2012 playbook when GM hired the 3,000 HP ES personnel that were running its information tech systems on an outsourcing contract, HP and IT consultant Ciber brokered a deal.
A number of the newly laid off HP Enterprise Services employees will be offered jobs at Ciber and have 48 hours to accept or decline. HP confirmed the agreement with this statement provided to Business Insider:
"HP reached an agreement with a strategic labor partner, Ciber to allow more flexibility in managing labor demands. There are a small number of employees who will move from HP to Ciber, and become contractors to HP’s Applications Delivery Services organization. HP will continue to own and manage the end-client relationship and overall service responsibility."
Ciber is a Denver, CO-based IT solutions provider leveraging HP products and services along with offerings from Microsoft, Oracle and SAP.
