A nasty surprise greeted workers at the Cambridge, UK headquarters of Torus Group Ltd – which became part of Trend Datalink last year. As part of its continuing attempt to rationalise the two organisations, around a dozen staff were made redundant a month ago, mainly from the administration, marketing and sales teams, as their roles were taken over by staff at Trend’s High Wycombe Office. Torus’ general manager Steven Jordan acknowledged that the cuts were swift, but denied claims from some of those made redundant that the development of Torus’ Enterprise 3 Network operating system would be seriously affected by cuts amongst the research and development team. At the time of the takeover last year, Torus had 40 developers; this is now down to 15. Now the ex-employees, who asked not to be named, say that the latest round of cuts means that only six people are left to develop future versions of Enterprise 3. Jordan puts the figure at seven and points out that the company can call on the resources of the much larger Trend Development department as required. The cuts will only affect some of the nice to have developments he said, adding that the core team working on Enterprise 3 had been left untouched. Jordan also denied suggestions that Torus would be going direct.
