Thread regarding Oracle Corp. layoffs

THIS “While Oracle knew chief information officers, Mr. Hurd said in an interview, "We didn't know the head of HR. We didn't know the chief marketing officer."” IS NOT TRUE. And any journalist who didn’t check up on it is obviously a shill to oracle public relations team. Furthermore, the following paragraph to the article that talks about MH hatching the idea to hire college kids so that he can then get contacts in the HR management or marketing management or financial management at each of his customers besides the CIO’s is a joke . First of all the veteran wraps wouldn’t tell him H if they had contacts at the top because They don’t want to take him to meet them as he is embarrassing, a compulsive liar and destroys relationships as fast as he gets introduced. And, the kiddos call the mai. Switchboards at their target companies and talk to secretaries ...they are notable to get high even meetings . How can a journalist not see through this? Or better yet, how can they not check into it. This media outlet publishing this should be ashamed at such half-a-- investigation.

SIGHHHH.

“"All they could talk about was that they partied and they sold. They would go to work, sell stuff, party, sleep some, sell stuff and party. This was life. They were so energized," he remembers.

He told Ellison about the dinner and the two of them wanted to bring back that startup feel to Oracle. He and Ellison decided, "Let’s go back to the future, the way it used to be," Hurd recalls.“

There is soooo much you can infer from this quote!

1. Two old white guys in major crisis

2. Incorrect conclusion linking youthful energy with success

3. Churn only at 40-50% ... today it’s more like 60-70%

4. Sell, party, sleep, sell ... this is a) incorrect & b) not happening — hurts sakes performance by the hubs & kids is in the toilet so far.

5. The kids in hubs have figured out how to game the Phone systems at corporations to hit their call quotas and associated bonuses$ without actually talking to anyone at the companies, Mgmt has no clue.

Oracle is on the way to becoming the laughingstock of tech.

Oracle is not building a high school and never will. Oracle build a facility and rent it to charter school, Oracle do not own the high school.

http://www.businessinsider.com/oracle-class-of-program-college-recruiting-mark-hurd-2016-9

The idea was inspired by a dinner he had with his daughter and her friends who had just graduated from college. They were working as salespeople at a startup and were rooming together in San Francisco.

"All they could talk about was that they partied and they sold. They would go to work, sell stuff, party, sleep some, sell stuff and party. This was life. They were so energized," he remembers.

He told Ellison about the dinner and the two of them wanted to bring back that startup feel to Oracle. He and Ellison decided, "Let’s go back to the future, the way it used to be," Hurd recalls.

And, because this is sales, all four of these Class Of grads said their favorite perk was the money.

Glassdoor says that Oracle BDCs make $68,000 on average, including cash bonuses and commission-sharing. But some of them have reported salaries to Glassdoor over well over $100,000.

High churn rate, no worries

That's not to say that all of the Class Of grads are happy or stay at the company. As the program heads into its fourth year, the churn rate is pretty high. Between 40% and 50% of graduates don't stick it out to become salespeople.

Hurd is fine with that.

"If this churned over four years to where we lost 40% of the people, we might lose half of that to other things inside Oracle. That is just fine," he says.

And, he says, as Oracle improves its training of both the college kids and the supervisors who mentor them, the number of Class Of graduates that leave is declining.

Meanwhile, sales of Oracle's all important cloud products, which most of these kids sell, were up nearly 80% last quarter and are on track to become a $2 billion business this year, Hurd says.

"If at the other end, I get 50% or 40%, it doesn’t matter. My entry-level costs to bring them is materially lower than what it would be to bring in a mercenary hire," he says, meaning poaching a top salesperson from another company.

"If I get people who are great and are productive, this is a home run for me," he says.

So long veteran field sales! If this post is right... and it looks like it is. June 1st 2018 is probably your last day.

http://www.foxbusiness.com/features/2017/08/17/oracles-sales-staff-revamp-is-bearing-fruit-wsj.html

Oracle Corp. is starting to see the benefits of revamping its sales force, addressing longstanding questions from Wall Street about the software company's commitment to cloud computing.

Just a few years ago, Oracle was ill-equipped to do so. Its highly compensated sales staff targeted chief information officers at corporate giants, looking for big-budget deals that came with fat commissions. The company not only bypassed smaller businesses -- who were among the early adopters of the cloud's web-based, on-demand computing services -- but also the division leaders at big companies who were starting to buy cloud services piecemeal.

While Oracle knew chief information officers, Mr. Hurd said in an interview, "We didn't know the head of HR. We didn't know the chief marketing officer."

So he created a program in 2013 to indoctrinate hires fresh out of college in Oracle's sales methods, rather than solely hiring veteran sales executives from other companies. Called "Class Of" -- playing off the term for a group of graduating students -- the program aims to develop a low-cost sales force that prospects for new markets. Oracle taps its own seasoned salespeople to become mentors to the newbies.

In four years, more than 4,500 representatives have gone through the five-week Class Of program. Mr. Hurd figures that in a decade or so all of Oracle's sales leaders will be graduates of Class Of

The program didn't initially sit well with some Oracle veterans, who worried mentoring duties would pull them away from managing their own accounts.

Good bye Oracle veterans!

This has to be true. Its too stupid not to be true. The executives really are going whole hog on global call centers. They really did set aside 1.1 billion in severance packages. They really do have over 400 million to go.

Lots of money to pay out in severance packages + new call centers coming online = solid probability this rumor is accurate.

Oracle is now building high schools to teach the next class of. In 2019, college kids will be too expensive with their 6 figure student loan debt. Why not get high school kids for free and have them work on real projects for grades?

Momma don't let your kids grow up to be programmers, they should be doctors and lawyers and such... the masses will not have money to buy anything but food so it will not matter in the end... de-evolving to LCD.

The turnover of these new kids is astronomical, in excess of 50% over a 6 month period. He has, oracle bought a hotel along rt 101 - the Marriott right next to the SFDC office, to have somebody to house them all for training. Given how little training oracle gives them, needing to own an entire hotel property gives you a sense of the volume of kids being processed through the wringer. Insane!

To echo the last couple posters, employees are like widgets to Oracle. That’s why there’s no professional development, minimal raises (not even COLA) or other retention efforts (RSUs), etc. To the Three Stooges, newer cheaper widgets can always be found. So...the new call center in Austin, which they aim to fill with cheaper widgets.

Wonder how Oracle’s efforts to fill those “dialing for cloud dollars” seats at the new building is going? Has ORCL’s illustrious reputation as an employer preceded it with the millennial set?!

@3ite - spot on!

The strategy has failure written all over it. The "kids" won't pick up anything. They won't have the resources or the knowledgeable people to learn from. The top execs don't seem to have a clue how anything gets done. They seem to think of all employees as interchangeable bodies. Just put some bodies in a call center and your done! What else could there be?

People take time to learn and need the resources to do that. This will be the ultimate failure of Oracle's 'treat the employees like interchangeable objects' strategy.

The kids are probably fine; the set up is utterly deranged and will definitely fail.

Everything is moving to the hub. The question is, can these kids pick up enough skills to be effective and will people buy software from some kid over the phone and web conferences? I doubt it.

Yep, newbies in a call center tying to seek software through PP demos, you simply cannot be more deranged, detached from reality and imcompetent than that. And yet that’s oracle for you today. What a shame, there goes another company that failed to adapt to a changing world.

@R4AdLKu-1emd you said it perfectly.

Amen amen amen.

@R4AdLKu-1ozw

The new normal is developers are important. These guys pick the technologies. For sales instead of wooing the CIO, you hold hackathons and showcase your technology. Developers are not impressed by recent college grads with click through demos and power points.

It means the new normal has shifted from infrastructure and enterprise software (hardware and software complete) to problem solving. The new normal is hands on showing the developers how to solve real world customer problems with your technology.

It means old monolithic software and software companies are not what you should be working with. Need to find a job with the new nimble companies. Amazon, Google, MongoDB, Cloudera, Redhat, Pivotal, MuleSoft, and the like. Avoid IBM, HP, Oracle etc... and to some degree Microsoft.

" Will there be new opportunities and new jobs with this new normal? Just a hypothetical question."

Isn't the point of using the cloud two fold:

1) You don't have to buy hardware

2) You don't have to buy SW licenses

3) You don't have to hire staff to maintain HW or SW or to trouble shoot them

I suppose there will be new opportunities, buy many existing jobs will be going "poof!"

You may find the new IT paradigm to be boring and uninspiring. Only two places to be, in the cloud ops doing admin on a grand scale, or in a company trying to manage and corral all these “fill-in-the-blank” As A Service that make up the new server room. Will there be new opportunities and new jobs with this new normal? Just a hypothetical question.

With the Intel security flaw and patched systems to be about 50% slower, does this mean that SPARC just had it's execution postponed?

AWS, Azure, and Google are only x86. Does this change anything?

meanwhile AWS is moving into the on-prem space.

http://www.businessinsider.com/amazon-released-linux-software-that-runs-on-corporate-servers-2018-1

This is interesting. Given the transformation going on with the field sales engineers for all pillars. Is leadership at that level in the dark or just doing a bunch of shifting and tap dancing to pull the wool over everyone’s eyes?

@1pgq - right on, my thoughts exactly !!!

This is...emh..I was writing Old News, but I will rewrite it as Confirmed News.

Not so sure what's really happening in SW, but HW field sales org is already officially gone, at least in EMEA. APAC will follow shortly, possibly H1FY19, depending on specific agreements with Fujitsu that are being discussed right now.

Details per region/country still to be officially disclosed, but I'm sorry it will be a massacre unfortunately. Anything between 50% and 75% of the current field sales/presales org will be riffed between january and march, depending on region. This is for ES/Servers, not sure though about Storage ad Tape (in some countries they are still separated from ES/Server)

It's funny because Salesforce being a true cloud company is taking a different approach with great success. This is clear to me why KB left Oracle and is now crushing it at SF. He did not agree withMH cost cutting approach. SF has a broad and deep field team. They are getting large deals. MH is running Oracle into the ground in a massive cost cutting move that will kill Oracle's future prospects.

Any odds that the "self-managing" database is also doing periodic metrics reporting back to HQ to enforce license terms? Not letting any pennies slip through the fingers can help achieve that 80% margin.

Self fulfilling prophecies usually do. Someone should let MH in on that secret.

All of which raises a simple question: when will these ridiculously overpriced 3 stooges be replaced by a computer? Now would be a good time. Maybe replace them with SFDC’d Einstein?

Lets not forget that people are the problem. Human's are error prone and costly. The new autonomous database does everything but sell its self.

https://twitter.com/twitter/statuses/947959903947079680

Soon it will sell its self, after it learns how to dial a phone and search through linked in profiles. Once that happens Oracle will close down the new call centers they just built. That also shows another flaw in the paradigm shift. You cant sell more product with cheaper less skilled humans, any more than you can patch a database with cheaper less skilled humans. You just get more errors.

Makes perfect sense given what the 3 stooges have been doing and saying. This is an experiment on an unprecedented scale and one which I believe is going to completely fail. The reality is that none of the 3 stooges know anything about enterprise software and how companies buy and implement it. So yes, things are changing out there in the world, but oracle’s response to these changes is assenine and will fail massively. In the meantime it is impacting many competent oracle employees, which is unfortunate. A lose- lose as both the employees and shareholders will be much worse off at the end of this failed and unnecessary experiment.

The new call center in Austin is scheduled to start moving millennials in as we type, ramping up through this March. The article below also mentions a second phase of the new Austin location. Sounds like ORCL could have as many as 5,000 dialers for cloud dollars at that site within the next couple years.

http://www.512tech.com/technology/oracle-big-bet-austin/BYeYssjTMEY3MLMBKJTvlK/

@R4AdLKu:

Good info. Thanks for the input. Keep us updated on further happenings.

ok