The mood at Beit Comverse in Ramat Hahayal in Tel Aviv reflected employees disappointment but no surprise at the latest wave of layoffs announced by CEO Andre Dahan on Friday.
"In a word, a shame," said one employee at the Arcaffe café next door to the premises of Comverse Technology Inc. (Pink Sheets: CMVT). "This is a good company with good people."
Another employee, who has worked at Comverse since 2005, said, "This is in the best American tradition. They sit there in America, cut off from the mentality in Israel, and fire people en masse. There are no pay cuts there, they prefer to cut off heads. Employees are sent home and the executives stick their hands in the till and distribute bonuses."
Is it true to say that Comverse has been stuck since it invented the voice mail box? "It's wrong to say that there's no innovation here, as is seen in that all iPhones and other smartphones have our Visual Mail product. Don’t forget that we also invented MMS. In general, we're a kind of giant start-up," added the employee.
The employee nevertheless believes that Comverse should have tried to break into new fields. "It's necessary to think outside the box and enter a range of other software fields, because Comverse has a lot of abilities. That's what managers are for. The problem is that instead of looking several years forward, they look no farther than the next quarter."
The employee said that while Comverse has been firing employees in multitudes lately, it has also been hiring quite a few employees through outsourcing. "This is the greatest Israbluff," he said.
Published by Globes [online], Israel business news - www.globes-online.com - on August 16, 2010
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