With Tintri layoffs, hybrid vendor waves a final goodbye

A new round of Tintri layoffs has cost 200 people their jobs, including its top sales executive, as the hybrid vendor winds down operations. The move leaves Tintri with about 40 to 50 employees.  Tintri said in a June 22 securities filing the job cuts are an effort to preserve “limited cash resources.”

The cuts were not unexpected. Citing insufficient revenue, Tintri has informed federal regulators it likely would cease operations by June 30, barring an acquisition or last-minute infusion of funding.

June 30 is a sadly ironic date for Tintri’s demise. It is the anniversary of the vendor’s star-crossed 2017 initial public offering.

The fate of remaining employees remains unclear, but the next step appears to be bankruptcy protection. Tintri is not the first vendor to get ahead of the market, only to lose ground to competitors. All-flash array vendor Violin Memory won kudos for its fast performance storage, but stumbled into bankruptcy when competitors beat it on integrated flash software. Now Violin Systems, the vendor got a second chance when it reemerged with new financing this year.

Among those let go is Tom Cashman, who had been Tintri’s executive vice president of worldwide sales and alliances. Cashman was promoted to that position in March after serving in other sales leadership at Tintri since 2014.

News of Tintri layoffs comes two weeks after the abrupt resignation of CEO Tom Barton on June 18. Barton took the reins April 2 after Ken Klein voluntarily stepped down.

It marks the second major round of company layoffs enacted this year. Tintri fired 120 employees in January.

In a related matter, Tintri acknowledged it has received a notice from Nasdaq of potential delisting of its publicly traded shares. That also comes as no surprise, considering that Tintri stock (TNTR) has been trending toward the pink sheets since May.

Nasdaq issues a noncompliance notice when a company’s shares trade for less than $1 for 30 consecutive days. TNTR shares hit a high of $7.75 a share during its first month of trading, but the share price has steadily fallen since then. In what is likely its last day of trading, TNTR closed Friday at 13 cents a share.

Tintri was founded in 2011 by Kieran Harty, a former vice president of engineering at VMware. Tintri VMstore arrays targeted highly virtualized storage environments.

More recently, most sales involved Tintri E6000 all-flash and T800 cloud arrays to hyper-scale data centers and service providers. But the rise of cloud storage tier was not enough to lift Tintri to new heights.