Vehicle life cycle management software provider Solera Holdings Inc. is going viral for all the wrong reasons.
Solera conducted a round of layoffs via Teams on Monday. Unbeknownst to company officials, the cutback announcement was filmed by one of its employees and later posted on TikTok.
Employees were evidently upset and quick to voice their opinions of the layoffs and the way they were executed in the video.
“This is bull—-,” said one woman in the video.
“You guys don’t care, that’s the problem with this company,” said another upset employee. “You guys have not cared about your employees at all. Automate [acquired by Solera in 2019] used to be an awesome company. You guys bought us and f—– us royally. I’m so disgusted and I’m the only one on this team who has tried to f—— fix everything. Good luck with the billing, you guys are screwed.”
FreightWaves reached out to both Solera Holdings and the TikTok account to clarify details of the layoffs but had not received comment by the time of publication.
According to a Tuesday update on Layoff.com, West Lake, Texas-based Solera released 44 members of its U.S.-based billing team and “now all of their billing is done in Mexico.”
A LinkedIn post suggested layoffs were also carried out at Dealersocket, an automotive dealership management system acquired by Solera in May 2021. That deal also included fleet management software Omnitracs. All three companies are portfolio companies of Vista Equity Partners.
Past layoff problems
This is not Solera’s first time executing mass layoffs to ship jobs out of the country.
Five months after acquiring Omnitracs and Dealersocket in 2021, Solera laid off 30% of its total employee count, moving many of those jobs to Mexico and India.
Related: Omnitracs’ layoffs and product concerns are nothing new, source says
According to an Omnitracs human resources employee at the time, layoffs were a regular occurrence, taking place two to three times a year since 2019 as part of Vista Equity Partners’ overall strategy to sell the company.
“They have been trying to sell Omnitracs and have been very focused on profits. At one point there were talks with Goldman Sachs that didn’t go through because they just wanted more money than Goldman was willing to pay. … Continuously being in talks with someone to try to sell has been a trend,” the HR employee said.
Those talks would represent the fifth time Vista Equity has attempted to exit its Omnitracs investment.
In March 2021, there were talks to combine the three companies — Omnitracs, Solera Holdings and Dealersocket — to go public under blank-check firm Apollo Strategic Growth Capital (NYSE:APSG) for a potential $15 billion. Unfortunately for Vista Equity, the special purpose acquisition company strategy had cooled off on Wall Street as technology valuations fell 3.5% that month.
This is a developing story.
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Updated: Massive layoffs hit Omnitracs and DealerSocket