Pure Storage Inc. is reportedly letting go as many as 275 employees, or 4% of its workforce, following two previous rounds of job cuts early last year. 

Blocks and Files reported the move today. Pure Storage confirmed the layoffs in a statement without commenting on the number of affected employees or specifying what teams had their headcount reduced. 

The unit responsible for managing the company’s partnerships is reportedly among the impacted departments. Additionally, Pure Storage is believed to have reduced the headcount of teams that work on several of its flash storage arrays’ software features. Those features include the systems’ data protection capabilities, which help customers recover records after outages and block ransomware.

The affected teams were reportedly also involved in the development of Pure Storage’s database, artificial intelligence and analytics features, as well as its unstructured data management capabilities. The company provides a line of flash systems called the FlashBlade series that is specifically optimized to store unstructured records. The series comprises two sets of appliances optimized for performance and cost-efficiency, respectively.

The company said in a statement that “as Pure continues to scale and maintain a record of high growth and innovation, we recently completed a workforce rebalancing initiative to align our employees with company priorities and areas that are strategic to the business.”

Those priorities include Evergreen, a Pure Storage program that allows customers to purchase flash arrays on a pay-as-a-go subscription basis instead of buying everything upfront. It’s available in three tiers dubbed Evergreen//Forever, Evergreen//One and Evergreen//Flex. After the company’s most recent earnings report, Chief Executive Officer Charlie Giancarlo told investors that the latter two offerings are now “our preferred services for providing customers data storage on a consumption basis.”

Pure Storage is also prioritizing the AI market as part of its growth efforts. The company says that it closed a “double-digit number of AI wins” in its fiscal third quarter ended Nov. 5. During the quarter, it also received a BasePOD certification from Nvidia Corp. for its AIRI reference architecture, which combines flash appliances, graphics cards and management software in a single offering.

The layoffs are believed to mark the third time it has made job cuts since the start of 2023. According to today’s report, the company restructured its sales organization last April and earlier axed an unspecified number of positions in January.

While it didn’t comment on the scope of the latest layoffs, Pure Storage detailed that “the employees affected by this initiative were eligible to apply to open roles and also offered outplacement services to assist with their job search outside of Pure.”

The storage maker reported sales of $762.8 million for the third quarter, which represented a year-over-year improvement of 13%. That growth was partly driven by a 26% jump in revenues from subscriptions such as Evergreen pay-as-you-go storage contracts. The company’s earrings of 21 cents a share topped the consensus analyst estimate. 

Image: Pure Storage