Oracle Cuts Hundreds Of Jobs Amidst Cloud Confusion

Oracle has quietly cut hundreds of jobs over the past few months, with many affecting its cloud services division, amidst internal squabbling, according to a report.

Some staff said they believe the cuts could affect up to 10 percent of Oracle’s entire pool of 138,000 employees, Business Insider reported, citing unnamed sources.

Oracle did not respond to a request for comment.

In March filings with the state of California, Oracle said it planned to cut 255 people at its Redwood City headquarters and 95 in San Jose.

Infighting

The cuts also reportedly affect 300 staff in Seattle.  Washington State laws only require disclosure if 500 staff are affected at a single location, compared to similar laws in California with a threshhold of 50 employees.

Oracle also reportedly cut 900 jobs from a research and development centre in China earlier this month.

The cuts come amidst confusion and infighting around Oracle’s cloud strategy, with two distinct internal groups competing internally for resources and using separate data centres, the report said.

The cuts in California affected Oracle’s older cloud group, while the Seattle layoffs targeted staff at a next-generation group that had been intended to revamp the company’s efforts to compete with the top cloud players.

Cloud strategy

Two of the top three, Amazon Web Services and Microsoft, are based in Seattle.  Silicon Valley-based Google is also a principal player in cloud infrastructure.

Even as it laid off staff, Oracle has reportedly continued to hire cloud engineers away from Microsoft and Seattle, often with the promise of large salaries.

The report follows the last year’s departure of Thomas Kurian, Oracle’s former president of product development, from the company after 22 years, reportedly following differences with Oracle co-founder and chief technology officer Larry Ellison over the company’s cloud strategy.

Kurian was named senior vice president of Google Cloud in November of last year.