Sun remains silent on ANZ staff cuts

Sun Microsystems, which recently announced it was shedding up to 6,000 jobs globally, is still unsure if or how its 640 staff based in Australia and New Zealand will be affected, according to the company's managing director.

Duncan Bennet, MD of Sun Microsystems in Australia & NZ.
(Credit: Sun)

Duncan Bennet, who has been running the Sun's ANZ operations for about a year, told ZDNet.com.au today that he still had no information on how many local jobs could be at risk.

Despite Sun recently announcing that revenues had dropped seven per cent, Bennet said the job cuts and restructuring would allow the company to focus its resources on areas that had the potential to thrive in a tough economic climate.

"We have been here before. If you think about the dot-com bust, the world at that stage was going to end but it didn't," Bennet said. "If you think about that period, it was when open source and linux really started to pick up — as people were looking at saving costs and doing things in a more cost-efficient way."

"If you go back and track the adoption of Linux or Apache and some other initial open source products, that is when they started to pick up. We think we will see exactly the same thing this time around as people try to cut costs."

Bennet added that the restructuring package would allow Sun to take advantage of market areas that were likely to grow.

"The Q1 results were down seven per cent and most of that was reflected in the US high end server space. This restructure is trying to get the focus in the different areas," he said.

"People have not stopped buying big computers or survey arrays. Technology is not a discretionary cost — it is a core part of their business. Customers will continue to do things with IT but will want to do more with less," he added.