The former maker of expensive printer ink HPE and Mirantis have laid off roughly 200 OpenStack developers in what is a swift kick in the open saucy project’s development.
For those that came in late, OpenStack is the open source project for cloud computing infrastructure which was supposed to be the next big thing for suppliers trying to create customer projects.
HPE is busy gutting itself so that it focuses on supply chain productivity, discretionary spending and efforts to reshape the workforce. OpenStack was not really that useful for that cunning plan.
The mid-October layoff included at least 65 people from HPE’s Stackato group, which is in the process of being sold to Micro Focus International’s SUSE. In total, given the changes at the Yehud center and across the whole organization at least 100 HPE OpenStack engineers have cleaned out their desks.
That would be suitably grim but Mirantis appears to have done something similar. Mirantis co-founder and chief marketing officer Boris Renski said that his outfit restructured following the acquisition of TCP Cloud.
This meant that Mirantis wound down a number of engineering investments that it didn’t feel were aligned with its new focus of delivering an operations-centric OpenStack distribution through a build-operate-transfer model, Reknski said.
Renski said about 100 OpenStack Developers were laid off and another hundred or so were moved about.
Staff which seemed to have been packing their bags were those involved in a deployment and management tool for OpenStack, and the Workloads team who were trying to build a PaaS product.
Renski pointed out that his outfit was not abandoning OpenStack or exiting OpenStack distribution business.
However, Stackalytics, a website that tracks OpenStack community contributions, shows that OpenStack interest seems to be declining. HPE and  Mirantis were important players to the project.
