Sun Microsystems announced a slash in the employee headcount yet again - this time a little deeper to appease investors and to get back to profitability. On Friday, the company talked of a restructuring that involves layoff of 15 percent to 18 percent of its global workforce, which works out to approximately 5,000 to 6,000 employees.

The move was long expected, particularly due to years of flatline revenues of the company, and a lack of profits in many quarters. Sun expects the layoffs to cost somewhere between $500m and $600m over the next twelve months, with an estimated $375m to $450m in costs hitting the books in Sun's current fiscal 2009 year.

Along with the announcement of slashing jobs, the company also announced restructuring itself into three different divisions, which involves breaking up of its newly-created Software Group, and spreading its parts into the new Systems Platforms, Application Platform Software, and Cloud Computing and Developer Platform groups at the company.

Sun's reorganization of its software operations includes the departure of the executive vice president of software, Rich Green, who was a long-time Sun executive in charge of Java.

In a statement announcing the layoffs and the company restructuring, Jonathan Schwartz, Sun's president and CEO, said: "We have taken decisive actions to align Sun's business with global economic realities and accelerate our delivery of key open source platform innovations - from MySQL to Sun's latest Open Storage offerings."

The company statement said that it expects to see the benefits of cost savings starting in the third fiscal quarter, which runs from January through March of 2009.