This thread is for info about potential Gannett layoffs? Any chatter, news or rumors?
15 replies (most recent on top)
Heard about the "offer" from ICS. Employees were told there was a 1to 2-year employment guarantee. This is not the case within the offer contracts.
The offers from Infinite came today for those being rebadged and they are disappointing. Good luck retaining us!
Just had my meeting and everyone on my team was given the "as of June 14 your position will be transferred to Infinite". Everybody in Enterprise Infrastructure pretty much just got told today we have 90 days and we're done.
"Severance information should come from HR today or tomorrow, no packages will be given until May."
If ICS fails and can't do the job as expected since they're not a great outsourcing company, there will be no one left to rebuild from (not even the SL1/EM7 admins were spared).
Gannett IT just had layoffs. IT is being outsouced. I was one who was just notified that their last day is June 14th. I think there are close to about 300 employees in Gannett IT, and everyone from Applications, networking/infrastructure, enterprise support is either losing their jobs or being offered a position with an Indian outsourcing company. A few folks were retained, but who knows how long they will be retained for.
I received a layoff notice today. June 14th is last day. Looks like this will affect a vast majority of all employees that are part of the teams that were listed in the original email. Only about 15% of all people in those mentioned departments are being retained by the company, and everyone else is either being terminated or rebadged under Infinite for one or two years.
Gannett Technology, as we know it, is finished.
The latest, although I'm not sure what he means by "transparency" since he's been everything but transparent through the process.
"Hello everyone,
As you may recall, in early December, I sent out an e-mail stating our intent to identify managed service partners. Recently, a decision was made to outsource a portion of our business including Applications, Infrastructure & Networking including Enterprise Support Services, Identity & Access Management and Tech Operations.
Infinite has been selected as the vendor and we executed a contract last week. Impacted employees will fall into these categories:
IT function is in scope for outsourcing and employee will be retained with Gannett to assist with the engagement in current or an expanded role
IT function is in scope for outsourcing and employee will be offered a position by Infinite
IT function is in scope for outsourcing and employees will be retained with Gannett for the duration of a transition period and then terminated and offered a severance package
Employees will be informed Thursday, March 16th on how this change will impact them. I appreciate your service and commitment to Gannett. I commit to transparent communications and navigating these changes together.
As part of our decision to engage with Infinite, we have terminated our contract with Cognizant effective March 3, 2023. We have started the transition of services in scope under Cognizant, which includes all Help Desk services with a goal to have this fully transitioned to Infinite in the next 90 days.
Additionally, the Information Security and Compliance functions will be in scope for outsourcing and will follow quickly after the areas identified above. We have engaged an additional partner for outsourcing the organization’s Information Security and Compliance functions and are working through the scope of services and contract details. We are actively working on transition of the areas in scope.
These decisions are not taken lightly, and the days and weeks ahead will require close partnership with our leaders and our human resources team to support you as we go through this transition."
Allegedly dispositions should start getting distributed this week.
Hunger Games is real y'all. :)
Technology update - Statement of work signed with Infinite. There will be 3 groups:
those retained
those rebadged to the new contractor
those laid-off
The largest number will be those laid off
Severance will be offered to those laid-off
unknown how long rebadges are for.
90 day for Cognizant folks to train Infinite folks. then they get to apply for jobs with in cognizant.
If you glassdoor the contractor there is very little that is good. Benefits suck, HR sucks, work environment sucks.
Cognizant employees on the Gannett contract were notified yesterday that the Infinite contract was signed and a notice of termination was delivered to Cognizant with a 90 day transition period where Cognizant will train with Infinite to transfer services.
Not a word from Gannett at all to Gannett employees on how it will impact them, and what additional services will be handed over to ICS. But at least there's that email announcing there's a special guest for the town hall. insert eyeroll here
It's pretty clear that Vincent and his direct reports aren't really focusing on a quality outsource partner and are going for cheapest they can find. ICS was glanced at in 2018 and it wasn't a good look, aside from the fact that they didn't have good commentary from former customers. Tata (TCS) would have been the better choice if it was going to be done out of "good for the business", however nothing being done now is good for the business.
For all the babble about how this is "to cut our tech spend", it's an abomination that they refuse to look at Product's outrageous cloud spending which includes a lot of "test" and "non-production systems" that we're paying out the ear for (and we're still using multiple cloud vendors for a massive spend there too). Pile on how different parts of the company run off and sign contract for applications that already have a competitor existing in our infrastructure so we're paying for both at one time? Yea. The human element should have been the last thing to change after fixing all of the actual platform and licensing spending.. but it's not about saving the business, it's about paying off the massive GH debt we're stuck with.
Infinite Computer Solution in Maryland
We expect an announcement for Gannett Technology by mid-March. Then we find out who will stay, who will be let go and who will be rebadged to the Outsourcing company.
They have it down to one company. About 5 weeks to signing the contract. It will effect most if not all of technology. There will be a rebadging thing making employees work for the contractor while they teach others to do their jobs. That will be about 6 months.
They are about to outsource more IT team to third party service providers.
From CTO email
"we reached out to several service providers to provide information on architecting a migration to managed services for parts of our ecosystem.
We have narrowed that initial outreach down to two vendors who will provide managed services, we are now working to establish the agreements and scope of the work. The decision to proceed down this path is not one taken lightly but will help the organization gain additional efficiencies and allow for cost saving opportunities within 2023. "