CA slashes 31 research staff in Melbourne (updated)

CA has cut 31 staff from its Melbourne security research and development laboratory.

CA director of security business unit, Andrew Kelly, said the cuts were made after the acquisition of three companies resulted in the duplication of skills in the field of identity and access management.

“It is a global decision about where they need resources for projects next year,” he said. “We’ve got a lot more staff after three acquisitions and they have looked at which projects or products staff will be developing next year.”

Staff affected will be offered assistance to help them find new jobs internally and receive severance packages.

“There are about 70 people remaining in the Melbourne centre and that is still a fairly big R&D centre. I think a few of them will potentially look for security roles in the market.”

Kelly told ARN the vendor was not looking to make any further changes to its headcount and the cuts had no impact on its channel strategy.

“It won’t impact the channel from a negative point of view because it wasn’t a sales related decision.”

In early January, CA announced an agreement to acquire for an undisclosed sum data-leak prevention vendor Orchestria, boosting the software maker's security, privacy and compliance technologies.

Before that it also bought role-based access and identity management vendor Eurekify for an undisclosed sum in November last year and IDFocus, a seller of identity management software, in October.