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SANgate Shuts Israel R&D

Data migration appliance vendor SANgate Systems Inc. has closed its Israeli R&D center in Even Yehuda, laying off 22 engineers in the process, company officials confirm.

SANgate, based in Southborough, Mass., has decided to relocate a handful of its engineers to the U.S., where it is beginning to see sales trickle in, say company execs (though there's no word on who these customers are yet).

George McHorney, SANgate's CFO and interim CEO, met with workers in Even Yehuda today to inform them of the company's plans. Only four employees have been asked to transfer to the company's U.S. headquarters, leaving SANgate's total headcount at around 25 employees. There will be some layoffs in Southborough as well, but SANgate was unable to provide details on this yet.

"In these times, anything you can do to streamline the company is of value," says Paul Feresten, VP of marketing and business development at SANgate. The decision also reflects the company's recent move to sell only open systems data migration appliances. "Israel was mainly the legacy mainframe stuff," says Feresten.

Like many storage startups, SANgate has been though a rough period in the last 12 months attempting to carve out a new market during the IT spending crunch. The effort has taken its toll on the company's management team, now operating under McHorney, its fourth CEO (see SANgate Loses Third CEO and SANgate Gets New CEO ).

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