Following our report about job losses at BlueJeans earlier this week, UC Today was disappointed to learn that yet more UC professionals will start 2020 with an urgent hunt for new work - as Fuze are said to have dismissed a quarter of their workforce, with the greatest impact on the UK and other European offices.
The only public sign of the turmoil is the replacement of CEO, Colin Doherty (recently named in Comparably’s Top 30 CEOs of 2019, ahead of Jeff Bezos (Amazon) and Tim Cook (Apple), based on employee ratings) with former CFO, Brian Day. In a blog post from Brian Day yesterday, this change was announced with immediate effect, along with further new brooms in the role of COO and CSO.
The official announcement emphasises a new business plan designed to ‘play to strengths in the enterprise market’, and ‘continue propelling the business forward’. There are references to ‘critical and challenging changes across our global organisation’, and helping larger companies transition to cloud communications and embrace digital transformation - as well as helping their enterprise customers to reduce costs.
Reducing costs
This mention of costs is perhaps the only hint at the streamlining in human resources, and does not touch on the personal experience of hundreds of people laid off just before Christmas, by a firm recognised just last year by Inc as a ‘best workplace’. The irony piles deeper, considering that Fuze, about whom rumours of a 2019 public offering came to nothing, creates software which helps people collaborate, and are proud of their ‘strong emphasis on building an employee-centric culture’.
It’s a sobering reminder during the party season that while the UC industry as a whole is going through transformative technological advances, the competitive business environment remains uncertain and challenging. Following every explosion and differentiation in any sector some retrenchment and consolidation is inevitable, and the aggressive hiring seen earlier this year was bound to face a slow-down. It’s a shame to see a brand recognised as a UCaaS leader in The Forrester Wave just a few months ago experiencing such shifts, but it’s a reminder to us all that the bottom line is just that, and in any commercial enterprise, profitability rules. If the rumours of a public offering this year had come to fruition, maybe all of those positions would have been secured - and as such, it’s the C-suite where strategic decisions are made, for better for for worse.
We reached out to Fuze and their PR agency forwarded the following written response from new CEO, Brian Day:
