Oracle Layoff Staff

It was a shock to the public and Oracle’s employees, especially those that were affected by the cut-down on Friday. The layoff was later confirmed by Oracle spokesperson Deborah Hellinger, she however did not disclose further details of staff affected.

“As our cloud business grows, we will continually balance our resources and restructure our development group to help ensure we have the right people delivering the best cloud products to our customers around the world,” said Deborah.

This announcement remains surprising, as there was no formal announcement of Oracle restructuring program before the layoffs. Also, the company had recently announced a 3% growth in revenue during its Q3 2019 earnings report which totaled $9.6 billion.

Although, the number, department, locations or positions of affected staff were not officially announced, sources reported that about 100 employees were affected in India, 30 in Manchester and more reports are still coming.

Also, the public is holding to reports from the anonymous online forum “thelayoff”, where the anonymous users claim to be Oracle’s affected employees. It was there reported that, Don Johnson, EVP of Oracle Cloud Infrastructure, sent out an “organization-wide email” to employees on Friday morning where he talked about how well the company was doing following its better-than-expected earnings report in the previous week. It was added that, Johnson mentioned the cuts are necessary to make the founder and CTO Larry Ellisons’ vision for Gen 2 of the Oracle cloud a success.

It was also reported that 32 engineers worldwide were let go from another Oracle Cloud Infrastructure team specifically, those working on an older version of the cloud known internally as OCI Classic, or OCIC. Also 43 people were laid off at Oracle’s Silicon Valley headquarters from the Management Cloud team.

While analysts try to align the staff cuts with the newly confirmed restructuring program, it’s however, more derailing to read in another report that about 50 more cuts were made in areas such as marketing which is not expected as they could be relevant to the new system.

Rob Enderle, Tech Analyst, Enderle Group; bluntly suggested that the cloud message could be a misdirect, and that Oracle was in fact most likely just desperate to cut costs. “We’ll understand this better when we see the next financial reports,” he added.

This is not the first layoffs carried out by the company as they had about two rounds of staff cuts in 2017 where they laid off a number of staff at the Solaris and Scalable Processor Architecture business units and 450 staff from its hardware business earlier that year. It is however, surprising and raises skeptical views as most recently they also lost two core staff to Google Cloud.