Best be Nimble, best be quick. You're out of a job at HPE – and that's sh*t

We are hearing that Nimble staff, no longer needed by Hewlett Packard Enterprise following its acquisition of the storage biz, are being laid off – up to a hundred of them.

HPE bought Nimble for $1.2bn in March, and a fairly obvious way of making synergies in the acquisition playbook is to absorb Nimble's engineering organization into its own, but use its existing back office, sales and marketing functions to handle the Nimble products. Then you can lay off unwanted staff and save cost. And lo, it is so.

We're hearing laid-off execs may get up to a year's salary plus immediate vesting of some portion their stock options. Folks in the trenches may just get standard redundancy terms. Before it was swallowed by Hewlett Packard Enterprise, Nimble employed roughly 1,100 people.

An HPE spokesperson told The Register today: "HPE worked with the Nimble team to ensure the combined organization is set up to deliver best-in-class solutions and uninterrupted service to our customers. As with many M&A transactions, unfortunately some duplicated roles existed across the teams and subsequently led to these actions."

Reg comment

I guess we can call this aspect of an acquisition collateral damage. Employees are, after all, only human resources and if the resources are not needed then they have to go. Businesses are not charities and this sort of thing shows it only too well.

It is obviously a sad and bitter pill for the unwanted human resources to take. Having been the recipient of such a pill in the past, I can say they deserve sympathy and respect and best wishes. ®