Calero-MDSL has closed its New York City office and laid off several senior sales and relationship management staff as the vendor implements a more technical sales model worldwide.

Sources say the market data and telecoms inventory and cost management software provider shed more than 20 staff across a range of roles, including developers, IT professionals, service delivery and telecoms expense management relationship management, as well as its remaining two New York-based market data specialists, and another member of the data team in Hong Kong. These follow the departures at the end of last year of experienced data specialists Laura Foggini and Frank Colombo. It will now service market data clients from its other global locations, including its Rochester, New York and Phoenix, Arizona locations in the US, its three offices in the UK, and its Asia office in Hong Kong.

The staff affected are said to have been “blindsided” by the move, which was unexpected, considering the company signed up a record number of customers for its market data platform. “None of us were non-contributors to revenue. We’ve all been in the industry for many years, and we’ve all bent over backwards to serve clients and make them happy,” says one former employee. “I was as puzzled as anyone.”

The company confirms some departures—though disputes the total number—but says the move is part of a longer-term strategy to provide even better service to clients and meet their evolving and growing demands via a team with broader technical skills, says Alistair Brooker, general manager of the market data business line at Calero-MDSL, based in the vendor’s Tunbridge Wells office.

“We unfortunately had some long-termers leave the organization, but have backfilled with more technical, data-savvy team members to better assist our customers with the huge amounts of integration and automation that they ask of our MDM system. We have this technical account manager model working very well to support our customer demands in EMEA and have been working to set up a similar model in the US also.”

Despite “record” client wins over the past 18 months, “the customer support model in our US team wasn’t as assured as I wanted it to be,” Brooker says. “There were improvements we’ve wanted to make for some time. This wasn’t a recent snap judgement.”

The number of staff affected may be a fraction of the company’s roughly 850 employees, resulting from MDSL’s 2017 merger with former competitor telecoms expense management software vendor Telesoft and a 2019 merger with Calero. In addition, on August 2 this year, the company announced the acquisition of Iowa-based telecoms expense management provider Network Control and its staff for an undisclosed sum. LinkedIn estimates Network Control brings a further 67 employees to the combined companies.

As the market data component of the company’s overall business has been diluted by multiple telecoms expense-related deals, “the perception is that they’re focusing more on telecoms than market data,” says one source familiar with the situation. However, as this source and others note, if the company plans to cross-train telecoms and data staff to cover both sets of offerings, the two are “different animals and require different skill sets.”

The company insists it remains committed to its market data business line. “In terms of our market data business, I couldn’t be more excited, with a record number of new customers coming to us in the last 18 months—the most we’ve seen in 15 years. It confirms to me that we’re on the right track with our roadmap and customer solutions around the MDM product,” Brooker says. “New team members are getting skilled in data analysis/engineering, customer account management, participating in the FIA training programs run by FISD for market data knowledge, and are learning from the experienced team members around them who have 10 to 15 years in the industry. This is the model of team member that we’re looking for to answer our customers’ requirements and expectations for a system that is now expected to handle more than just market data cost allocation.”

But end-users aren’t as excited by the news. One former MDSL client said they would be concerned by the loss of experienced staff. “Some of those people have been there forever. They know every inch of that software, and in some cases had set up special workflows specifically for me,” the source says. “You can hire a brilliant kid out of school and train them on the software, but that industry experience is a big deal.”

Another former MDSL client that recently switched to a competing system for unrelated reasons says the departure of such experienced staff—citing Foggini as being their “go to” person at the company—would have been a worrying “red flag” and might have hastened their decision.

Nevertheless, Brooker insists that once the changes shake out, the vendor will have a better sales, account management and support model, and its clients will reap the rewards, noting that the company continues to grow and make additional hires. “The client growth mentioned over the past year and a half has occurred globally … and we continue to attract interest from new customers in our products globally,” he says.