Novell Inc said yesterday that it will shed about 60 marketing and sales support staff as part of a company-wide product marketing and management consolidation process aimed at streamlining the organization to focus on e-business. In addition, a source close to the company confirmed that Novell is on the brink of replacing senior VP of marketing, John Slitz, who left the company back in August. The source confirmed that Slitz’s replacement would be hired from outside Novell and added that an announcement was due very soon.
A spokesperson for Novell said the job cuts come at a time when Novell is undergoing internal consolidation of its product marketing and management divisions into one unit. Although Novell hasn’t formerly announced the move, she said VP Dave Shirk was made head of the new group last month after the departure of marketing VP Patti Dock.
About 55% of the lay-offs will come from the company’s marketing department, the spokesperson said, with the remainder from Novell’s internal sales and customer response center. It’s all about looking for greater efficiencies instead of handing things over the fence as we did in the past, the spokesperson said. When you bring two groups together like this there’s obviously going to be some redundancy of efforts. The spokesperson stressed that the cuts only amounted to 1% of the company’s total workforce of about 5,300 employees. Even with the lay-offs, headcount is still up 14% year over year, she added.
The moves comes amid a general reshuffling of executives at Novell, following the resignation of both Slitz and senior VP of corporate strategy Chris Stone, who left the company in October to join a start-up. Earlier this week, Novell said it has hired the former chief executive at Hybrid Networks, Carl Ledbetter, as Stone’s replacement.
