Sun Microsystems may lay off 6,000 today
Last November, Sun Microsystems said it would be laying off up to 6,000 employees - or around 18 percent of its workforce - after a weak first quarter performance. The cuts are happening today, we’re hearing from a well-placed source, ahead of the company’s second-quarter earnings report next Tuesday.
The software company is facing hard times as the market has shifted from closed-source to open-source software technologies, like Linux, and it is facing stiff competition from larger rivals like IBM and HP. To boot, a significant portion of the company’s business is in the financial sector - clients that aren’t in position to make large purchases these days. Sun has been experimenting with software-as-a-service and other models to help it gain market share, and most prominently purchased open-source database company for MySQL for $1 billion last year. Here’s some more from the strategy announcement it released in November:
