Autodesk Lays Off 7% Of Employees

Sites include autodesk.com . Published on September 9th, 2012. Written by Anthony West.

500 employees of Autodesk, the digital design company, got the sort of news no employee likes to hear recently. The 500 or about 7% of Autodesk’s workforce was laid off in the wake of disappointing earnings performance for the second fiscal quarter.

Second quarter profits fell 9.3% and it seems to lay off workers ranging from 3D developers to product managers is part of a restructuring stance taken by the company’s board. Autodesk CEO and president, Carl Bass, did his best to explain the cuts: “Our own execution challenges, combined with an uneven global economy, resulted in disappointing revenue results for the quarter. The changes better position Autodesk to meet the needs of our customers. We are focused on working through our internal challenges as rapidly as possible.”

News of the job cuts were apparently delivered on a one-to-one basis, but even so, that will be cold comfort for 500 people who now must seek employment elsewhere.  And perhaps the cruelest irony of all; Autodesk is seeking to create around the same number of jobs in the coming year: “As part of today’s announcement, Autodesk shared plans for a restructuring related to executing on the company’s strategy including its continuing shift to cloud and mobile computing.”

This ‘continuing shift’ no doubt shows that businesses are now moving fast to change service delivery and in many ways, the way services are constituted. Autodesk certainly won’t be the last company this quarter to shed the old for the new.