A recent state filing indicates that Hewlett Packard Enterprise Co. laid off 81 Massachusetts-based employees of SimpliVity Corp. in February, a week after closing a $650 million acquisition of the Westborough-based data storage company.
The layoffs were reported to the state's Executive Office of Labor and Workforce Development under Worker Adjustment and Retraining Act requirements. The cuts occurred on Friday, Feb. 24, according to the filing – one week after the deal closed and one day after HPE CEO Meg Whitman talked about the acquisition in a quarterly earnings call with investors.
HPE declined to share more information about which departments were affected by the layoffs or how many SimpliVity employees remain with the company.
“HPE worked with the SimpliVity team to ensure the combined organization is set up to deliver best in class solutions and uninterrupted service to our customers," an HPE spokesperson said in an emailed statement. "As with many M&A transactions, unfortunately some duplicated roles existed across the teams and subsequently led to these actions.”
In June 2016, SimpliVity landed a $100,000 state tax incentive to add 100 jobs and retain 390 more at its Westborough headquarters, but the company won't be eligible to receive the money until the 2018 tax year and could have the incentives decertified. The company had 750 employees worldwide as of December 2016.
When HPE announced the acquisition of SimpliVity in January, it was one of the biggest exits in the past year for a venture-backed tech company, but a surprisingly low price tag for a company that had previously been valued at over $1 billion.
HPE announced its first data storage product implementing SimpliVity's technology on March 21.
Founded in 2009, SimpliVity focuses on "hyperconverged infrastructure" — a hardware-software combination allowing large companies to efficiently store all kinds of data in off-site server farms.
SimpliVity had raised $276 million — including a $175 million haul in March of 2015 that made the company one of just a handful on Massachusetts "unicorns" (private companies valued at more that $1 billion). The company had been considered a potential candidate for an IPO in 2016, but toward the end of the year talk turned towards the possibility of an acquisition by HPE. As recently as November, rumors pegged the deal at $3.9 billion.
Hewlett Packard Enterprise was split off from the computer-maker Hewlett-Packard, now HP Inc., in 2015 and focuses on business customers. The $52 billion revenue company has also taken an interest in Cambridge startup Tamr Inc., agreeing in March to resell Tamr's big data software.
