Marlborough Tech Firm Lays Off 87
Egenera Inc. has laid off 87 people, representing 28 percent of its worldwide work force, a spokeswoman said.
That total includes 35 positions at the hardware and software company’s Marlborough headquarters.
Jan Tarzia, a spokeswoman for Egenera, said the company is making the cuts as part of a transition to focus more on its software business, though she said they are also partly a response to the current economic downturn. She said Egenera has been moving away from selling hardware directly to customers and instead partnering with other hardware manufacturers to sell its virtualization software.
“It’s a transition that’s been happening for about a year,” she said.
Currently, she said, the company invests its engineering resources about evenly into the two sides of the business, possibly focusing slightly more on hardware.
Tarzia said the cuts were across the board, but largely focused in sales and marketing.
Egenera was founded in 2001, and is supported by venture capital. It focuses on companies’ data centers, and started out selling a server called BladeFrame. Tarzia said the market for that type of product has been highly competitive, leading the company to focus more on marketing a software component of the BladeFrame system, known as PAN Manager. Egenera now works with companies including Dell Inc. to make PAN Manager available on their machines.
However, Tarzia said the company will not completely give up on the hardware side of the business.
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