With management now openly changing the role of SEs on the field and expecting them to perform tasks and duties that are outside their typical role and certainly not inline with their original job description, it is now more clear then ever what the intentions are. The expectation to line up 6-9 customer meetings every week between existing customers would mean that you would be meeting with each customer every month. Most customers dont want to meet every month... specially if they are not buying anything new. Management knows this already and is using this to decide who they can put on PIP and ultimately "fire" for poor performance without having to pay them a package. Lets face it, we are in revenue decline because of mismanagement and now the employees are expected to pay the price. Many of which have been with the company for a long time and have contributed a lot over the years and now are being given the short end of the stick. If the headcount is in need of adjustment, why not at least do the noble thing and pay people their package? I am willing to bet that if they asked employees to volunteer for a layoff and still get a package the majority of employees would take the offer. This would show the reality of how low the employee morel is and how poor the company is being managed. Perhaps, this would make it difficult for KKR to sell Omnissa to a potential buyer once it became evident how things are running in here.
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The overpaid adoption product manager or lighthouse BS that they call themselves now need to go.There is no product,there is no adoption, so why are they even a thing? Would anyone buy this sh-t. All part of the same tech marketing,overpaid bunch of ivory tower id--ts. cliquey bunch of wasters.
I can only imagine how bad the layoff package is now. Rest and vest. Rest and vest. Rest and vest.
The main reason the customers don't want to buy is because our technology has become outdated and the focus to consume our product has changed for most of our customers. No one cares about VDIs or MDM any more or they its just not a priority for them.
Plus, the turbulent past few years have burnt out most of our employees. And to make matters worse, management has proven themselves to be incompetent's and not transparent. Employee trust and morel is at its all time lowest. We preach about "happy employee = happy customer" but we don't adopt that ourselves!
Our products have not improved, they have gotten sloppier... support was an absolute nightmare for the longest time and its NOT significantly better today. Our own internal tools and IT resources are not working half the time. Our customer facing resources and portal keep going down for mysterious "maintenance" reasons.
Customers are fed up, employees are fed-up and burnt out. Management wants to wash their hands off from responsibility and say "Your free to leave..." or "You got a pay check" for your time but don't want to address their lack of competence. Many of us employees INVESTED our time and energy into being here and now are on the loosing end because of miss-management...
My manager finally admitted that he believes our decline is unstoppable because Microsoft knows our customers are leaving due to KKR's influence. Meanwhile, our customer success managers don't have the skills, tools, or financial offers to convince our customers to stay. Our SEs are in a similar state. Another reorg won't fix anything.
Fire the incompetent management executives... they are the reason we are in this mess.
Changing the roles of the SEs and framing them in order to fire them with cause is pathetic and the oldest trick in the book of shady management... there will be legal retribution I'm sure.
@an Carta shows valuation??
They're getting SEs more involved and are going to lay off CSMs
Another strategy they are using making things so bad for certain staff to the point where they are taking sick leave. I handed in my notice and left because I could not take the load anymore. I had no job to go to but being unemployed is less stressful than working in Omnissa. My old colleagues are all burnt out from dealing with the stress and customers are getting really angry because of the poor service. FLM's are powerless and are being forced into morally questionable behavior. Most of my colleagues are trying to find other jobs but the market is difficult.
The strategy is to educate the Lighthouse Architects on the larger accounts (ARR and churn risk). Then eventually eliminate the associated SEs. Within 1 year? 2? (Similar model to Citrix btw, although they are even more transactional. Limited corporate knowledge of their accounts).
Corporate SEs to be retrenched as well, if/when partners can take their place.
all salez managers have gone bezerk and just follow KevN’s po-p sense that he spits out from his garage/ basement gym. they not care for humans anymore
kev’s new guy AV is an utter waste of shiite space in the black hole continuum
@br Is Omnissa sales actively chasing new logos still? How's that going? There's a reason that Citrix quit doing that altogether after the PE takeover. I was an enterprise SE there for years, until after COVID, and the number of customers we were losing to Microsoft were outpacing the number of new logos since like 2017. I keep hearing that DaaS is going to replace laptops because it's now cheaper or at least cost comparative, but I don't see it happening. They keep saying agentic AI is still going to need a DaaS-based Windows desktop... I'm not sure I buy that customers who think that are going to spend another $200-$300 per seat for a DaaS license on top of everything else. I guess we'll see.
This is LITERALLY what they did at Citrix as well. Trying to make the SE's into "Account Technical Strategists". No new logos, just trying to accelerate adoption and upsell/expand in existing accounts. I was a Citrix SE for years and this worked about as well as you would expect. I covered enterprise/strategic accounts and even monthly cadences were just BS sessions to review support cases or "hey let's go out to lunch" especially with customers who'd just renewed a 3 or 5 year deal, and/or already had the highest all-in licensing bundle. WTF else is there to sell? I can't make them hire 200 more people to add licensing between term renewals. There's probably a handful of "ATS's" now at Citrix for North America when there used to be hundreds of SE's in the US alone. Everyone either was let go or left and went somewhere else (a lot got out of the EUC space altogether - it's a miniscule and hyper-niche career field now, with a limited future).
It's becoming clear that KKR is unable to guide Omnissa out of its ongoing decline. Cutting costs and shrinking the company is the only game in their playbook.
they know the job market is in shambles, and they know many people don’t have a ton of options at the moment. The “soft layoff” attempts are so transparent. Layoff CSMs, Overload Lighthouse with an impossible managed account number and give them CSM duties too, then sc--w over the SEs. There are similar plays happening in almost every department. I know people who would take a pay cut to escape this nightmare. Morale is non-existent, everyone is stressed. It’s gone from an amazing place to work (VMware) to a completely toxic work environment.
Senior leadership needs to be removed and replaced.
I agree, managing out the non-performing executives. That sounds long overdue.
Shankar's reorg distractions are working. These comments demonstrate how we're now blaming each other, instead of our inept executive leadership team. Do not lose sight of the one thing that's not changing. KKR won't fire the clueless people leading our continuing decline.
I have one word for Shankar and his direct reports: LEAVE! You are truly worthless.
Managing out the non-performing sales members. Sounds reasonable.
@OP How about actually trying to sell to a new customer? If you say you don't have new accounts, then you're telling us that all 12 you do have own everything Omnissa sells, right? The complaints from people who make $225K+ OTE to travel and do their job is deafening.
One word for you, LEAVE!
@OP being with the company a long time and contributing a lot earned you prior paychecks. If you aren’t contributing to expectation today, then you should evaluate if there is another place you should be. That’s true for any company.
If the sales org was actually doing their jobs for the last year, this wouldn't be happening.
@OP Agree with this analysis. They won’t offer packages to leave because the cost would hit the bottom line and have to be deducted from the company’s valuation. Highly unlikely they’d change the strategy at this time. Log into Carta and see the latest Omnissa valuation (vs what it was before Sept 30). Whatever they showed they did during July - Sept to increase the valuation, they’ll keep doing that.