Cloud News
Aviatrix CEO: Why ‘Nothing’s Wrong’ With AWS, Tech Layoffs
Mark Haranas
“Everyone just kept hiring, hiring and hiring, whether it made any sense or not. There was no downside to it. And all anyone cared about was growth at any cost,” Aviatrix CEO Steve Mullaney tells CRN.
Aviatrix CEO and longtime tech leader Steve Mullaney believes people shouldn’t be panicking due to the massive layoffs currently occurring in the IT industry, including recent tech layoffs at giants like Accenture and Amazon Web Services.
The amount of “over hiring” technology companies did over the past few years during the COVID-19 pandemic was put on check from Wall Street and the financial markets during the summer of 2022, he said.
“Everyone just kept hiring, hiring and hiring, whether it made any sense or not. There was no downside to it. And all anyone cared about was growth at any cost,” said Aviatrix CEO Mullaney (pictured) in an interview with CRN. “Then last summer hits. All of a sudden everybody then says, ‘We’ll now, hang on. That’s not the way the world works anymore. You actually have to be profitable.’ It’s going back to what’s normal.”
[Related: Why Accenture Is Laying Off 19,000 Employees: 5 Things To Know]
Mullaney leads Santa Clara, Calif.-based Aviatrix, a multi-cloud networking software company focused on driving cloud transformation and optimization. He was previously the CEO of Nicira and has held top executive positions for the likes of VMware and Palo Alto Networks.
AWS Layoffs
IT companies of all shapes and sizes have been conducting massive layoffs, starting in the second half of 2022 and continuing into 2023.
In March alone some of the largest tech companies in the world conducted large layoff rounds, including Accenture cutting 19,000 employees, Meta axing 10,000 staff and Amazon saying it would lay off 9,000 employees, including at AWS.
“My bet is AWS hired tens-of-thousands of people over the last year. I bet they way over-hired. So I wouldn’t view it as a weakness in AWS,” said Mullaney. “It’s not ‘Oh, what’s going wrong with AWS?’ No, nothing’s going wrong.”
AWS declined to tell CRN how many employees will be cut from the $85 billion cloud company.
In an interview with CRN, Aviatrix CEO Mullaney talks about why so many large layoffs are occurring in the tech industry right now, why partners and customers shouldn’t be worried about layoffs at AWS, and how Aviatrix is helping enterprises as cloud operations are being passed over to the networking team.
