Gupta Corp is to say farewell to co-founder Umang Gupta, fire 17% of its workforce, and hide its blushes over that by changing its name to Centura Software Inc, a name that even its fans will find hard to remember. Chairman and chief executive Umang Gupta is retiring, handing full control over to Sam Inman, who has been president and chief operating officer since April. The Menlo Park company says the restructuring will result in a fourth quarter charge of about $9m and will include consolidating facilities and operations as well as the layoffs. The company will also write down its fixed assets, capitalised software and other assets. The workforce reduction leaves the company with about 330 employees, down from about 380. The restructuring moves are designed to bring the company’s costs in line with expected 1996 revenues. Over the nine months to September 30, Gupta lost $0.71 a share, compared with a loss of $1.51 a share in the first nine months in 1994. This announcement is a natural evolution of the plans we have had in place since Sam Inman joined the company last year, Gupta said. He and I have been running this company jointly for the last nine months. The new 32-bit Centura product line, to be announced formally at the end of January, is intended to provide customers with a logical evolution to second generation client-server computing. Gupta claims that worldwide, over 100,000 developers have licensed its SQL Windows application development environment and over million have deployed its SQLBase database management system. This is a classical reorganisation, with the founder leaving and taking his name with him. It doesn’t sound very positive, Mike Heylin, senior associate with Creative Strategies Consulting Inc in San Jose told PC Week: this move will create questions and concerns for Gupta’s customers. They really have to rebuild themselves to market Centura.
