Cuts at Sprint Hosting

Sprint has laid off an undisclosed number of employees in its Web hosting operations, formerly known as Sprint E|Solutions, the company said today. The cuts were part of a larger reduction in staff that eliminated 575 jobs companywide, but the hosting cuts were not broken out. "The positions that have been affected have primarily been in sales," said Sprint spokesman Jeff Shafer, who said the move was intended to create "a more unified sales organization." While the news was grim for former E|Solutions sales staffers, the news was better for landlords, as Shafer said the company will continue to operate all 10 of its hosting centers.

Sprint was somewhat late to the web hosting game. In 2000 and 2001, when many companies began scaling back their ambitions as dot-coms and CLECs began to fail, Sprint was building out its hosting footprint by leasing space in 100,000 square foot chunks. The company currently has data centers in New York, Los Angeles, Atlanta, Sacramento, Boston, Denver, Silicon Valley (Santa Clara), Dallas, Kansas City and Reston, Va.

Industry chatter suggests the centers remain significantly underutilized. Earlier this year the E|Solutions unit was merged with the Sprint Business unit as the company sought to streamline its sales and customer service operations. "We sell (hositng solutions) integrated with everything else we sell," said Sprint's Shafer.