Thread regarding AVEVA layoffs

@16aq what happend?

Does anyone know what really happened yesterday in LATAM? I’m hearing things here and there, but nothing adds up. Was it an isolated case, or should we expect the same in other regions?

@13zs Yes, there are some very good managers at AVEVA, but unfortunately also some very weak Managers promoted as a result of cronyism and other so called leaders all the way up to the CEO. With regards to your comment about how you were selected for the Layoff, there were a few parameters that probably went into the decision. As part of the performance review process, Aveva managers were required to rank people as critical or non-critical to the business. They were also told that they could not rank all their employees critical, hence your immediate manager probably was intimidated to rank you as non-critical. Second, in order to avoid lawsuits for age and gender related discrimination, H.R. needed to include some filler employees to mask the statistics. What I'm telling you is it wasn't anything you did, rather you just happen to be in the wrong place at the wrong time. If you had been a poor performer, they would have PIPed (Performance Improvement Plan) you long ago.

Aveva is going through a major transformation from a licensed software model to a cloud SaaS model and frankly it's not going well. Publicly released data shows that the cloud growth is under 15% a year. Those inside know that even that number is fiction as many of the so called SaaS products are just on-prem products running on a server in the cloud. While this may seem as a sound approach, it does not scale and in a number of cases Aveva spend more money hosting the application than it receives in revenue. Their main platform Connect is a very modern architecture, but unfortunately does not have many cloud native applications. Since Aveva is owned by SE and SE is counting on Connect for their EccoStructure product as demonstrated by Chris Ns move from Aveva to run SE Eccostructure, Aveva is forced to continue to invest heavily in Connect at the expense of redeveloping old, buggy, insecure products that are funding much of the business.

@rvy There are definitely some great managers at AVEVA, some that were willing, and do go to bat for you. In my case that is why I stayed. The people I supported were the very best! But when it was time to be let go, the main management team I was under in the system, did not even check with the two other executives I worked for to see if they wanted to keep me on and under their budgets. In fact they were both surprised when I responded to emails requesting support and I let them know I was let go and couldn't help them. It's not our managers do will back you or raise concerns from the surveys you have to worry about. It's above that doesn't listen nor cares (or at least a majority of them). You're just a name and a number. doesn't matter your loyalty, your knowledge or you time with the company. The people being let go is still happening, just not in the one big lot at one time.

@13qg As far as I know there is no hiring freeze in place. Our team has been interviewing for an open principal engineer position with a few more interviews setup for this week and next week.

I heard there is another hiring freeze in place. Is this true? More layoffs in 2026?

@vgv Here is an interesting perspective from Aveva's customers about the recent layoffs.

https://www.linkedin.com/posts/jimgavigan_so-about-my-comments-on-the-aveva-cuts-post-activity-7382052817571569665-krl3/

AVEVA possesses significant potential to excel in the evolving landscape of digitization and sustainability. However, as noted in the post below, there are current challenges at the organizational level, particularly within R&D and Portfolio leadership. While it is estimated that annual investment in R&D ranges from $150 to $200 million, much of this appears to be directed towards maintaining existing legacy products, with limited emphasis on innovation. CONNECT serves as both a customer engagement platform and a strategic tool in the relationship with Schneider Electric.

Recent reductions in force and uncertainties related to slow growth and advancements in generative AI have contributed to decreased morale within R&D. There is an ongoing reliance on external consultants rather than internal initiatives to modernize software development practices. Leadership in R&D has adopted a reactive approach, focusing primarily on short-term survival rather than positioning the organization for long-term growth—an approach more typical of established legacy companies than dynamic and expanding software businesses.

It is important for executive leadership to critically assess these issues, set clear expectations, and drive increased productivity. Currently, the adoption of AI remains in its early stages, and significant progress is required to strengthen competitiveness. AVEVA benefits from strong products and a solid business model, but enhanced focus and execution are necessary to fully realize its potential.

Wow, absolutely loving the energy in this thread, real campfire of optimism going on here, so I figured I’d toss in my 2 cents before the whole forest burns down.

I’ve been with AVEVA for over 15 years, which makes me ancient enough to remember when “Cloud” just meant bad weather.
And let me tell you: the decline isn’t just real it’s Olympic-level.
We’re not just losing markets… we’re getting outplayed, outpaced, and outclassed by companies like Inductive Automation, who seem to have discovered this wild concept called "usability."

Our software? Oh yeah, it's cutting-edge if the edge was rusted, chipped, and from 2008.
But hey, we're still making money off customers who chained themselves to us back when we were the only game in town.
So that’s nice. Sort of like profiting from Stockholm Syndrome.

Let’s talk Leadership, or as I like to call it, The Million-Dollar Nap Club.
Imagine a group of well-compensated folks so detached from reality, they could hold a strategy meeting during a fire drill and still think the smoke is part of the vision board.

Innovation? Ha! They treat it like a stray dog, scary, unpredictable, and definitely someone else’s problem.
Instead, they’re too busy giving each other slow-motion high fives for switching on cruise control… while the company Titanic heads full speed toward the glowing blue AI iceberg labeled “Disruption.”
But hey, at least the band’s still playing.

And reaching some of these ELT folks?
You’d have better luck emailing a time traveler from 1300.
One user here called Leadership a “a highspeed clown car on fire” and honestly,
I don’t think I could improve on that poetic masterpiece. Pure chaos. With honking.

AVEVA desperately needs a leadership exorcism and maybe hire a few technical visionaries who can spell “AI” without first calling Marketing to confirm it’s still trendy.

Oh and “AI for All”? Yeah.
That sounds super inclusive and exciting.
I just don’t know anyone who’s part of it.
Not a single soul.
I guess it’s less a program and more of a bedtime story we tell Schneider Electric so they sleep soundly, thinking we're doing something

@rtt Hi there - I'm not a manager, but I work alongside one to help manage a team. I can tell you that yes, the survey results do matter and that leadership read them and try to bring change based upon the results. I've sat in meetings with my 'co-leader', reading the results and comments, working to find ways to bring changes. I have indeed seen change brought to both a local and organizational level based upon survey results, so, answer the surveys, be honest and forthright, and be professional.

Anyone here knows if the peakon survey’s make any difference? It’s unrelated to the tread topic but would be good have some insight if the leadership actually takes the survey seriously.

AVEVA, now part of Schneider, has profitable legacy products but faces challenges aligning its complex new product development model (Project Chrysalis) across R&D and Portfolio. While AI enables smaller competitors to advance quickly, AVEVA is slow to adopt it and relies on reactive leadership. The organization struggles with inefficiency, costly structures, and vague responsibilities. Instead of addressing these issues, management priorities branding activities. There's no strong leadership driving growth in software development, and communication lacks substance. Though the workforce is talented, it's uncertain how many will adapt as GenAI disrupts the industry.

@req Yeah, thats on point! ....anybody knows the movie "Human Centipede" - thats pretty close to the management structure at AVEVA ;-)

@r5t - Quite extraordinary, isn’t it, how many VPs and Directors have managed to weather the RIF unscathed? It’s almost as if seniority grants one a sort of magical invisibility cloak. Meanwhile, several of the very individuals who couldn’t quite deliver Connect have somehow found themselves promoted or shuffled into equally “influential” positions. The rest, unfortunately, were shown the door – chiefly the people who actually did the work.

As for the grand “portfolio selling strategy,” it appears to be more of a portfolio shuffling exercise. I’d wager three-quarters of the sales team couldn’t convincingly explain AVEVA story, let alone how to position the portfolio. Amusingly, not a single salesperson was let go in the RIF – rather impressive for a group largely allergic to anything technical and quite content selling the same products.

In the end, AVEVA remains a fine collection of silos, lovingly preserved and staffed by the same “yes-men” and “yes-women” who seem to have mastered the art of nodding their way up the ladder.

There are some insightful comments here. Here are mine:

• Calling the RIF a "restructuring", and doubling down on how he did it, saying that he'd do it the same way again, all while the HR VP sits there and grins was all I needed to know about the morality of our current CEO.
• Hearing about how important it is now to chase AI fads, instead of dealing with the issues in front of us tells me all I need to know about those that surround the CEO.
• Having recently started attending "all hands" meetings for the osi-soft side of the business tells me all I need to know about the current R&D leadership.
• Listening to the current gaslighting about Chrysalis tells me all I need to know about the Portfolio leadership.

In 5 years, they haven't been able to deliver CONNECT, and are still taking most of the investment away from the other products that are actually generating revenue. CONNECT is a product by itself and it shows - it has different branding, and the team managing it do not seem to think it important to talk much to those that are expected to adopt it. So, while damaging the existing portfolio through lack of funding, we weaken our customer sticking power, which is essential for getting them to pay more for less, which is ultimately what the PI/CONNECT story is and always was.

AVEVA didn't buy OSIsoft, it was the other way around.

@qck
classic AVEVA moment.
Someone dares to point out an obvious dysfunction, like, “hey guys, the building’s on fire” and immediately gets labeled negative by the elite squad of manager bootlickers. Bravo.

@qe2 good luck. 🤣

@qck
Oh no no, it’s not negativity, it’s called “realismus,” a rare and highly contagious condition where people start pointing out obvious dysfunctions.
You and your executive fan club should try catching it sometime.
Calling it “negativity” doesn’t change the fact that Leadership is basically a high-speed clown car on fire, and we’re all just pretending it’s a strategy meeting.

@qck Sounds very much like you are one of the folks benefiting from the situation:

12 promotions (higher job level)
16 progressions to senior responsibilities

...just within IT.

PROMOTE PEOPLE WHO GIVE A SH-T!!

@q7d Very eloquent. Stop bleating, stop spreading negativity and start building back stronger.

It’s completely understandable that those who were let go will have a very negative opinion. For those of us left the future is what we build together.

Stop blaming leadership for your own negativity.

If you can’t get onboard or don’t have trust why have you not left already ? That says more about you than it does about me

Go ahead and downvote - but seriously - grow up.

By the way I am a level F so not leadership - just trying to do a good job for our customers.

@q5k
AVEVA’s “AI strategy” feels like it was assembled by a committee that still prints out emails.

The talent on the ground is world-class, but leadership’s still trying to manage the future with yesterday’s mindset.

You can’t “align strategically” your way into AI transformation, you need ai-native leaders who code, ship, and iterate.

Leadership keeps announcing “innovation” while the tech foundation is held together by hope and PowerPoint slides.

Until that changes, we’ll keep calling it what it is: a Titanic moment with more decks of management than lifeboats of vision.

@q6y
Keep the lights on, folks, at least until ChatGPT v6 replaces the whole ELT team.

@q39 Bravo. Nailed it.
The sad part is you can practically hear upper management printing your comment double-sided, of course, to hit those sustainability KPIs before scheduling a 90-minute “Synergy Alignment & Ideation Session” to discuss it.

Try giving the builders a reason to stay.
You want innovation?
Try listening to someone whos actually written a line of code before.
This isnt just a tech debt issue it’s a full brown leadership bankruptcy.

@q5k As former employee that was recently flushed down the sh----r as part of CH awesome cost reduction excercise I´m happy to confirm, that the rant is absolutely true!!!

AVEVAs leadership is a joke and these fine ladies and gentlemen are going to sink the ship!!! Iceberg incoming!!

@q39 If you are a current employee then you should be ashamed of your comments as you are really now part of the problem. If you are not willing to try to make an improvement then leave - it’s simple - oh thought not. Rather just spread negativity and bring the rest of us down. Most of your rant is simply not true either.

While the rest of the world is being transformed by AI automating workflows, writing code, diagnosing diseases, we at AVEVA are courageously… still trying to catch up to Power BI dashboards.

Remember “AI for All”? That short-lived initiative that vanished faster than a GPT token stream?
Now it’s magically “AI for OSI people” because nothing says innovation like making AI feel like an exclusive yacht party.

Meanwhile, startup founders in hoodies are building LLM agents in 48 hours that make our product strategy look like it was drafted in Microsoft Paint. We’ll be outpaced by 3 guys in a garage by Q4.
But don’t worry there’s always a new diversity slideshow to distract us!

Message to Leadership: Might be time to gently escort the non-technical “thought leaders” off the bridge.
The ship’s on fire, the AI iceberg is dead ahead, and we’ve got people up top debating the PowerPoint color palette.

We need AI-native leadership, not more Nothingburgers in pantsuits giving us “strategic alignment” vibes, we need someone who actually knows the difference between a vector database and a salad spinner.

Right now our “AI strategy” looks like it was written by someone who thinks ChatGPT is a brand of toothpaste.
Replace the dead weight or buckle up for a glorious collision with irrelevance!!!

@p6n About 10 in NA. Not sure about other regions.

Posting this here, so everyone is in the know.

Apparently there was yet another RIF. Within the past few weeks, several were laid off in 'customer facing roles'. Curious if anyone knows how many or any other details.

@ndj I can now confirm that it´s all just BS as I applied for a role (just me, no other candidates), had my interview and was told that I´ll get the decision within a couple of days! After 2 weeks without an answer I reached out to them - still silence!
Just now, on my very last day I received basically a "F U" message!

AWESOME!

@mrd We were offered the opportunity to apply internally but at the same time were told by HR that they were not really fulfilling the handful of positions that were open.

@mrd
Ah, the sweet summer optimism of assuming common sense applies here.

As someone who’s been at AVEVA since Windows 95 was considered cutting-edge, let me offer you a veteran’s peek behind the curtain:

What you’re describing would absolutely make sense, in a functioning company.
At AVEVA, though, internal hiring is more of a decorative slogan than an operational reality.

Why promote someone who knows how things really work, when you can hire a shiny new external who won’t accidentally threaten a non-technical manager with dangerous things like competence, context, or questions?

Internal candidates? They know too much.
They’ve seen the skeletons in the code and server rooms.
They remember which project derailed and what managers nodded along.

Worst of all, they might ask questions like:
“Why are we doing it this way?”
“Should we fix what’s obviously broken?”
And we can’t have that. What we really want are “collaborative culture fits”, also known as yes-men who smile through the madness and update the PowerPoint.

So here’s the golden rule I’ve learned after all these years:
If you’re too competent, too curious, or too inclined to challenge the nonsense… congratulations, you’ve just disqualified yourself from internal mobility.

Sad but true. Carry on.

I’m curious to know whether those affected by the recent layoffs were given the opportunity to apply for open internal roles where there were overlapping skill sets, prior to their positions being made redundant.

On a related note, does AVEVA genuinely uphold its internal hiring policy? From the outside, it seems as though the policy is more for appearance than practice. It’s difficult to understand why the company wouldn’t prioritise placing an internal candidate who meets 70–80% of the role’s requirements, rather than recruiting externally—particularly when it comes to individual contributor roles at the same job level.

@m7r thought it had smt to do with adoption restructuring

@m6y These are the ones in the UK and EU. The law there requires the company to first look for another job for the impacted employees and if after 3 months they can not find one, then they are allowed to lay them off. I'm sure the leadership worked really, really hard to find them another job; sure they did. In the USA we have the WARN act, whic requires that employees be given 60 days warning that a lay off is coming if the company has more tha 50 employees and more than 10% of a team is impacted. Aveva skirted around this by moving people to different teams so that they did not trigger any of the WARN Act trip wires.

@m6h What? ..more layoffs incoming??

what’s the deal with the layoffs happening this week?

@g6x Be careful of what you wish for. Aveva's stated policy is to have 30% women is senior leadership roles by 2030. While it is a fact that women are underrepresented in tech and there are some highly qualified female leaders in tech such as Lisa Su of AMD and Safra Catz of Oracle as a couple of examples. Unfortunately in order to meet the 2030 timeline, Aveva has promoted and hired female leaders with dubious accomplishments for no other reason than their gender. This in addition to a CEO who came sales, not technology, has led many false starts, under funding for products providing the majority of revenue, cloud programs running way beyond plan and other poor execution. Knowing that you will be promoted because of your gender instead of your accomplishments has also lead to a brain drain and inability to hire top talent. The rank and file expect another round of layoffs after the New Year.

Several posts about the capabilities of the CIO. Not going to comment on her capabilities apart from saying the level of her capabilities is self evident; however when you couple that with her personality and behaviours it's not going to make for success. You do have to question the capabilities of the people who hired her and continue to provide the remit/support for what she is doing.

@ewm The kind of gaslighting we hear at AVEVA on a daily basis.

The “bigger picture”?
Here’s what it looks like from the ground.

We keep getting unity speeches, but every day still feels like OSIsoft vs. Everyone Else, two companies awkwardly sharing a logo.
Slapping a “diverse leadership” label on a slide deck doesn’t bridge that gap.

As for the layoffs? Let’s call it what it was: a purge of inconvenient voices, followed by a fresh coat of OSI-blue over the corpse.
Worse, they were executed with all the grace of a fire drill in a server room, cold, chaotic, and deeply impersonal.
If leadership wanted to show how little they value the people who’ve kept the place running, mission accomplished.

Watching last week the IT Roadshow pitch to Casper their “AI innovation”, a Copilot demo wrapped in $800K per year of consulting retainer. Either we’re witnessing staggering incompetence, or someone’s golf buddies are popping the Champagne.

If we actually want unity, how about we start with:
Acknowledge the split. It’s real. We all feel it.
Fix the product. We’re still shipping what feels like 2005 code.
Listen to customers (radical concept, I know).
Promote based on proven results, not volume or politics.
Cut the vanity projects and be transparent with ROI by product line.
And try transparency, for real this time, not the curated kind.

Until then, asking people to “recommit” feels less like leadership and more like rallying the crew to polish the deck, while the engine room is on fire.