Marketing Technology Firm Wheelhouse Cuts 10%

Online marketing technology play Wheelhouse confirmed today that it has cut
its staff by about 10 percent in an effort to refocus on higher-technology
marketing work.

Spokespeople from Burlington, Mass.-based Wheelhouse said the company has
eliminated about 20 staff members whose “skills that weren’t mapping to the
way the business was going,” said corporate communications director Lisa
Colli. “It’s a skill adjustment.”

Wheelhouse provides strategic consulting, as well as outsourced
mass-market, profiling, and anticipatory/analytical online marketing
services.
Colli said that the firm is hiring in the database management and analytics
areas, and said that the cuts represent various positions involved with
functions other than number-crunching and technology.

Those cuts, and Wheelhouse’s increased emphasis in the more
data-intensive portions of marketing, underscore shifting priorities in
response to rapidly changing demand for certain of its services — which the
firm says is “good news.”

“We didn’t expect the business to be this technical, this fast,” she
said. “It’s moving much faster than we had thought. But our business
hasn’t changed, and we’re still following the same model.”

Demand for analytics services prompted the firm to increase the
importance it was giving to that side of its business, launching its
Applications Management Center — which hosts analytics systems — almost a
year earlier than it had originally expected, Colli said.

The firm recently completed its second round of financing, netting about
$52 million in cash from investors including Oracle Corporation, RSA
Security and Chase H&Q.