NetApp is laying off roughly 70 employees at the storage company's Sunnyvale, California, headquarters, according to Silicon Valley Business Journal. The cuts come even after NetApp in February delivered relatively strong financial results for Q3 2018 amid growing demand for the company's all flash storage solutions.
Indeed, revenues were $1.52 billion in Q3, up nearly 9 percent year over year -- or roughly $20 million more than Wall Street was expecting at the time, according to SeekingAlpha.
At the time, CEO George Kurian said customer and partner confidence in the company's Data Fabric strategy drove the revenue growth. Moreover, NetApp all-flash array storage business hit a $2 billion annual revenue run rate, up 50 percent year over year. Still, Wall Street wasn't impressed with the company's long-term outlook and shares fell more than 8 percent when those earnings surfaced.
Fast forward to present day, and NetApp appears to be making some targeted headcount cuts -- even as it pursues more hybrid cloud storage growth. No doubt, competition continues to intensify across the on-premises and cloud storage markets.
Meanwhile, Wall Street analysts seem anxious for a NetApp analyst day set for April. Some pundits are calling on the company to increase its dividend significantly. CFO Ronald Pasek in February hinted that details about such a move could surface during the analyst day. We're reached out to NetApp for the exact date of 2018 analyst day.
