NetApp plans to permanently lay off 77 employees in the San Jose, Calif., area as part of a strategic realignment aimed at shifting toward evolving customer needs and long-term growth, a move one executive at a NetApp partner says reflects NetApp’s push beyond hardware toward cloud-led storage management.
NetApp said it plans to permanently lay off 77 employees from around its San Jose, Calif., headquarters.
The all-flash and cloud storage technology developer last week filed a Worker Adjustment and Retraining Notification (WARN) with the California Employment Development Department detailing the dozens of job cuts. Under California’s WARN Act, employers with 75 or more employees are required to provide 60 days’ advance written notification.
NetApp in its WARN wrote that the company is conducting a reorganization/reduction in force that will result in layoffs at the company’s San Jose, Calif., location.
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“The planned layoffs are expected to be permanent. At this time, approximately 77 employees assigned to the facility are being notified the week of May 19, 2026, and will be terminated, effective the week of July 18, 2026,” the company wrote.
NetApp also included as part of its WARN notice a template of the termination notice it is sending to affected employees which reads in part:
“Please be advised that at this time the Company will not be coordinating services through the Local Workforce Development Board or any other entity. The Local Workforce Development Boards and their partners help laid off workers find new jobs. Visit an America’s Job Center of California location near you. You can get help with your resume, practice interviewing, search for jobs, and more. You can also learn about training programs to help start a new career. …
“The CalFresh program, federally known as the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP), issues monthly electronic benefits that can be used to buy most foods at many markets and food stores.”
The WARN notice also states that employees do not have bumping rights. Bumping rights as defined by the U.S. Department of Labor are defined as the “rights of workers with greater seniority whose jobs are abolished to replace (bump) workers with less seniority so that the worker who ultimately loses his/her job is not the worker whose job was abolished.”
NetApp, in a statement provided to CRN in response to an emailed request for more information, said the layoffs stem from a need to respond to changing customer requirements.
“NetApp is implementing a strategic realignment to respond to rapidly evolving customer needs and priorities, strengthen its positioning for long-term growth, and better align investments with emerging market opportunities. The company remains committed to supporting employees, customers, and stakeholders throughout this transition, while ensuring it is well positioned to meet future demands and deliver sustained value,” the company wrote.
NetApp had about 11,800 employees as of July 2025, according to a regulatory filing. The company in the same filing said that a significant portion of its operations and sales come from outside of the U.S., and most of its products are sourced and manufactured outside of the U.S.
One executive at a NetApp partner, who talked with CRN on condition of anonymity, said they see that investment realignment with “emerging market opportunities” happening at the company.
NetApp has had amazing success in selling its physical hardware into a wide range of environments, but knows future success is more likely to come from its storage management technology, the solution provider executive said.
NetApp’s management framework can span on-premises, colocation, and hyperscaler environments, and as long as a customer has NetApp technology, they can move things around, get good visibility, and have a path to the future to manage their environment more readily and base decisions about where to place workloads based on economic or performance considerations or both, the solution provider said.
“It’s really fantastically great,” the channel partner said. “But as a company, it has struggled in the field and also in engineering to merge these two different approaches, because a more holistic, much more encompassing sales motion, is dramatically more difficult than making an argument that lower latency against the database workload is better. NetApp had staffed and built compensation models that seem to lead people towards selling iron and not selling its cloud capabilities, or whatever you want to call the rest of their portfolio.”
NetApp’s “political power base” for a long time was around big iron, the solution provider said.
“They’re taking a good jaundiced look at their sales organization, the people that support it, at the people who build programs, at the people who enforce their compensation models, everything, and saying, ‘Look, this is where we need to go. It’s strategic, not tactical, and if you just want to do tactical, go do it somewhere else.’ That’s my guess as to what they’re doing.”
A couple of NetApp employees have in the last couple of days posted on LinkedIn about their experience with the layoffs. One, a support manager at the company, said his project was cancelled leaving to his being laid off. An AI storage infrastructure specialist, wrote that many people from his team were let go.
NetApp in its WARN notice listed the job titles of the 77 employees impacted by the layoff. Of the 77 employees, 30 had “engineer” in their titles, including a distinguished engineer. They included both hardware and software engineering positions. Another eight were involved in sales or marketing. Others were focused on a variety of other roles including business analysis, customer success, project management, and partner development.
NetApp last year also laid off up to 700 employees, or about 6 percent of its workforce.
NetApp is due to report its latest financial results for its fourth quarter and fiscal year 2026 at 5:30 p.m. on Thursday. The company’s stock is up more than 32 percent so far this year.
Wade Millward and David Harris assisted with this article.
