Quantum To Lay Off 180 Workers

Storage vendor Quantum said on Tuesday that it plans to lay off 180 of its workers.

The layoffs will be done with other unspecified steps to decrease expenses in response to the global financial crisis and market uncertainties, Quantum said.

The company expects the actions to cut costs by about $18 million annually.

However, Quantum said it will continue to increase investment in its data deduplication and replication technologies.

Those technologies are currently being used by EMC and Dell in OEM deals signed this year by Quantum.

Quantum in May signed a deal with EMC under which EMC is OEMing Quantum's dedupe technology.

The deal was followed in November with a similar arrangement between Quantum and Dell.

Quantum, whose shares have been battered recently by the economic crisis and concerns about its business, saw its share price rise from 16 cents per share to 20 cents per share on Tuesday on the news of the restructuring. However, its share price dropped to 13 cents as of mid-morning on Wednesday.

Quantum executives were unavailable to comment on the layoffs. However, a Quantum spokesperson said in an email to Everything Channel, "In deciding where to cut back, we were very focused on preventing any impact to customers or partners. In fact, with regard to our partners, we've recently made a number of enhancements to our channel program and last week announced the DXi7500 Express and QuikFit program to enable our channel partners to size, order and install deduplication solutions even more effectively."

Don McNaughton, sales manager at HorizonTek, a Huntington, N.Y.-based solution provider and Quantum partner, said he has seen no impact from the layoffs which he said have already started.

McNaughton said that vendors' problems in the tough economy make it difficult for partners and customers alike. "People watch company stocks," he said. "Customers are cautious. They don't want to buy from a company with problems."

The problem extends beyond Quantum to include other data storage backup companies, such as Overland Storage, McNaughton said.

"I don't think Quantum or Overland will disappear overnight," he said. "But, and all manufacturers will say so, spending is cautious. People aren't spending on IT until the last possible second, which means after January 1."

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