A few dozen consultants from PSD are being moved to R&D to turn service solutions into standalone products. Anyone have information on what this means for the consultants who were moved and for the ones staying in PSD? Is this an ease-in to layoffs in one group, or both?
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In other threads there have been suggestions to “turn PSD’s Risk & Fraud experience into solutions” as one prong of a path forward beyond or alongside SAS’ platform products. If SAS begins to lean on solutions as a revenue stream, that may recoup some sales lost to open source—if leadership can effectively assemble the parts and processes these solutions require. If they can, there’s no reason SAS solutions can’t compete in the respective industries. The knowledge base, tools, and skill sets are there and more readily available than many competitors had on their Day 1. If leadership drops the ball on the details, that will be an opportunity lost.
Or this could all be a way to boost the product catalog to attract investment. The opportunity exists. Not so sure about the motivation.
My personal take is that this was the alternative* to layoffs. Just wasn't enough billable hour work to keep all those consultants fully realized (a much more important metric in the IPO-readiness world). It was either lose consultants over the next year or so or move them to positions that don't need to be realized.
At least in the medium term (next 2 or so years) I think this is good for those who stayed AND for those who were moved. Longer term? It depends on whether the push to package the substantial IP created in PSD works out better than Solutions Factory has.
But either way, I see it as the exact opposite of an 'ease in to layoffs'. It would've been pretty easy to just lay off 40 people instead of reorging a different 40 and the fact that they didn't take this obvious opportunity to reduce headcount indicates to me that we are NOT (yet?) operating under a long term strategy of sustained layoffs to reduce headcount.
Or....I'm wrong.
This tells me there is NOT a big push to reduce headcount just for
There was a post where someone said they saw a lot of "science experiments". Maybe this is an example?
The company is full of these little one-off products. I've worked on a few, based on the internal workings of some mainstream product. Each was targeted for a single company or a single personality who felt the idea could "hit it big". None hit it big or went anywhere.
Is this a quiet admission that R&D isn’t creating compelling products anymore? Sales are declining, revenue is down, and nothing new from R&D in the last few years has gotten traction.
There are a number of posts on this forum that discuss a bloated product portfolio. This is how that happens. Good or bad for the Consultants? Who knows?