Staff layoffs at Fujitsu Queensland

Fujitsu Australia has laid off four long-serving Brisbane-based staff in circumstances the company has declined to clarify.

A memo sent by state manager David Sparksman to Brisbane staff and sighted by iTnews, revealed that four long-serving staff -- the Queensland state manager's personal assistant Daphne Ivins, solution manager and second-in-charge Deric Webb, senior sales executive Peter Driutti and administrative assistant Lynne Hough -- had been laid off in recent weeks.

Fujitsu recently merged locally with Atos Origin, and in April, with DMR Consulting.

Distributed Systems Technology Centre (DSTC) documents reveal that solution manager Deric Webb had been an official Fujitsu observer for the Commonwealth Research Centre (CRC) for enterprise distributed systems technology for more than five years.

Key research for the CRC includes emerging business technology areas such as workflow, CORBA, Java, XML, distributed object middleware, internet systems, knowledge management, metadata, collaborative computing, groupware, security and network infrastructure.

Another source told CRN that Ivins and Webb had worked for Fujitsu for decades. That source could not confirm the reason for the redundancies, but added that Fujitsu staff had suggested in recent conversations that management changes had caused a certain amount of turmoil.

“There's been a lot of management changes with [Fujitsu] merging with DMR,” the source said. “So we get certain information."

Sparksman would not speak to CRN about the redundancies when contacted, instead referring us to communications manager Gillian Lamrock. “We have corporate protocol about people ringing up,” Sparksman said.

Lamrock confirmed the four redundancies but said it was due to “natural attrition”. “But we've also just taken on at least seven people in the last eight weeks or so,” she added. “And we employ some 2500 people.”

However, she would not confirm or deny whether anyone else had been hired to do any of the four people's jobs.