Scott Goss

The News Journal

SevOne, a tech company once hailed as a future driver of job growth in Delaware, is expected to announce another round of layoffs Monday.

A spokeswoman for the company confirmed Friday that job cuts were coming but declined to comment further or provide any details.

It was not immediately clear if the layoffs would be companywide or focus on the Technology and Innovation Center that SevOne opened last year at the University of Delaware.

Sources familiar with the network infrastructure monitoring company said anywhere from a few dozen to several hundred employees could be let go with several high-ranking executives possibly among those slated to get a pink slip.

"As you know, SevOne has been working through a reprioritization process to position itself for future growth and innovation," said Bernice Whaley, director of the Delaware Economic Development Office. "The lines of communication remain open as they move forward in their process. SevOne is a global company; it is unclear at this time what impact, if any, restructuring may have on the facility here in Delaware."

Federal law requires companies to give states 60 days’ notice before a plant closure or mass layoff. As of last week, SevOne had not submitted a so-called WARN notice to the Delaware Department of Labor Department.

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The layoffs expected to be announced Monday would be the second round of job cuts at SevOne this year.

In late February, SevOne confirmed it had laid off “less than 10 percent” of the company’s roughly 525 workers worldwide. At the time, nearly half of that workforce was based in Newark.

SevOne called those job cuts a “reprioritization” that would allow the company to “focus our efforts on our core business and redeploy resources to our highest priorities – all of which will enable us to grow.”

Launched in 2005 by UD grads Vess and Tanya Bakalov and their best man Jim Young, SevOne developed innovative software to monitor customers’ networks and data centers – collecting information on everything from light bulbs and air conditioning to bandwidth and computing demand.

Comcast, Verizon, Lockheed Martin and HBO soon became customers and SevOne moved out of a Newark garage and into a global headquarters at the Linden Park Office Building in Pike Creek.

Satellite offices around the world helped the company see its annual revenue grow by 60 percent for four straight years – hitting $64.5 million in 2014, the last year the company released such data.

SevOne hired more than 200 new workers worldwide in 2015 as it prepared to move into a 48,000-square-foot headquarters at UD’s Science, Technology and Advanced Research (STAR) campus – a project backed by a $1 million taxpayer grant approved by Gov. Jack Markell’s administration.

The facility features a 32-foot metal slide that connects an office area to an employee lounge at the Innovation Center, Ultimate Frisbee tournaments every Friday and regular performances by the company’s in-house musicians The Garage Band — a nod to SevOne’s humble beginnings.

As late as last fall, Markell was publicly praising the company as an example of how the Delaware Economic Development Office was supporting job creation.

But SevOne’s heady days in Delaware began to turn soon after the company landed a $50 million round of private financing in September that brought its total venture capital to more than $200 million since 2007.

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At the same time, SevOne quietly moved its corporate headquarters to Boston, while the Bakalovs purchased a second home in Massachusetts.

Company officials said they did not inform Delaware officials of the move beforehand and downplayed its significance when The News Journal broke the story in November.

Three months later, the company initiated its first round of layoffs.

Around the same time, SevOne was forced to admit it had fallen victim to a spear phishing data breach that resulted in the “unauthorized disclosure” of employees’ W-2 wage and tax data, including workers’ Social Security numbers, home addresses, dates of birth and other personal information.

Contact business reporter Scott Goss at (302) 324-2281, sgoss@delawareonline.com or on Twitter @ScottGossDel.