Secureworks, an American cybersecurity company has announced plans to lay off 15% of its employees, to implement certain real estate-related cost optimization actions.
In a regulatory filing, Secureworks disclosed that, following the layoff of some workers, the company intends to rebalance investments cross-functionally in alignment with the company’s current strategy and growth opportunities.
This includes focusing on the higher value, higher margin Taegis Solutions, optimizing the company’s organization’s national structure to increase its scalability, and other priorities to better position the company for continued growth with improving operating margins over time.
In connection with the plan, Secureworks currently estimates that it will incur expenses up to approximately $14.2 million, the substantial majority of which are expected to result in future cash expenditures.
These expenses are anticipated to consist primarily of severance and other termination benefits, as well as real estate-related expenses.
The company expects to recognize these anticipated expenses during the second quarter of fiscal year 2024 and to substantially complete the plan during the third quarter of fiscal year 2024, although the timing of workforce reductions may vary by country based on local requirements.
Secureworks’ restructuring comes six months after a previous round of layoffs that hit 9% of its workforce at the time, or about 200 employees. The job cuts recently announced are believed to affect about 300 staffers, which would depart the company on the 25th of August.
While U.S. and U.K. employees will be informed immediately about their employment status, employees in the Middle East and Select European countries will be notified through mid-September, due to country-specific regulatory processes.
The workforce reduction announced by SecureWorks comes two months after it posted fiscal first-quarter results that fell short of analyst expectations.
During the three months ended May 5, the company logged an unexpectedly large loss and a year-over-year revenue decline. But while Secureworks’ total sales dropped, revenue from Aegis surged 68% in the same time frame.
SecureWorks is just one of the growing number of companies in the cybersecurity space that have implemented workforce reductions so far in 2023.
The company is a global cybersecurity leader with Dell Technologies, which enables customers and partners to outpace and outmaneuver adversaries on the dark web with precision, so they can rapidly adapt and respond to market forces to meet their business needs.
With a unique combination of cloud-native, SaaS security platforms, and intelligence-driven security solutions, informed by 20 years of threat intelligence and research, no other security platform is grounded and informed with this much real-world experience.
The company was founded as a privately held company in 1998 by Michael Pearson and Joan Wilbanka and is headquartered in Atlanta, Georgia, with over 5 offices worldwide.
It has approximately 4,000 customers in more than 50 countries, ranging from Fortune 100 companies to mid-sized businesses in a variety of industries.
Since its inception, SecureWorks has grown to 3000 employees. Diverse employees at SecureWorks have rated Manager, Leadership, and Executive Team as the highest categories they have scored.
Notably, on January 4, 2011, Dell announced that it would acquire SecureWorks to be part of Dell Services. Dell SecureWorks officially began operating as a Dell subsidiary on February 7, 2011.
Dell SecureWorks expanded into Australia and New Zealand region in 2013. It further opened an operations center in Sydney to meet demands from local Australian businesses, the most in-demand services in this area being Penetration Testing, forensic investigations, and ongoing monitoring of environments for attacks.
On December 17, 2015, Secureworks filed to go public. Subsequently, on April 22, 2016, announced its IPO, raising $112 million after pricing its IPO at $14 per share.
However, the company was expecting the initial price to be between $15.50-$17.50. This was the first tech IPO in the U.S. in 2016. In August 2017, Secureworks rebranded its logo and changed the capitalization of the ‘W’ in its name to lowercase.
Secureworks products help protect organizations from today’s most pervasive cybersecurity threats. With Secureworks, even the most mission-critical safety and security assets can be kept safe from threat actors.
The company believes that bad actors will continue to get smarter, stealthier and obtain better technology to meet their goals. Therefore, it is their mission to constantly remain steps ahead of their adversaries.
