VMware slashing 38 jobs in Broomfield

BROOMFIELD – Software company VMware Inc. (NYSE: VMW) is laying off 86 employees in Colorado, including 38 at its office in Broomfield.

The figures come from a Worker Adjustment and Retraining Notification Act notice filed by the company with the state of Colorado. In the WARN notice, VMware officials indicated that the Colorado layoffs would begin in late March.

It isn’t clear how many total employees Palo Alto, Calif.-based VMware has in Broomfield. A VMware spokesman on Wednesday said the company doesn’t release localized employment figures. He said he believed the affected employees would receive severance packages.

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VMware’s Broomfield office is at 380 Interlocken Crescent Blvd. The city of Broomfield offered an incentive package in 2008 worth more than $90,000 to locate the office in the city. Those incentives were contingent upon VMware maintaining 300 or more employees in the city from 2010 through 2019. However, an amendment to the agreement in 2010 reduced the minimum threshold to 150 employees.

VMware’s other Colorado cuts this week came at its office in Colorado Springs.

VMware makes software that helps run data centers and storage for large companies.

The cuts come as part of a larger round of 800 layoffs companywide announced by VMware this week as the company faces a reeling stock price brought on by the pending acquisition of EMC Corp. by Dell Inc. EMC owns a majority of VMware stock, and investors have been worried about what the Dell acquisition means for VMware, which had 18,000 employees worldwide before the recent cuts.

VMware’s share price has plunged more than 40 percent since the Dell/EMC deal was announced. They were down 10 percent to $44.44 as Wednesday trading neared closing time.

Company officials, in their quarterly earnings report this week, said they expect to take a charge of between $55 million and $65 million related to the layoffs, but reinvest savings generated by the cuts in “field, technical and support resources associated with growth products.”