Thread regarding Oracle Corp. layoffs

Buckle up its gonna be a bit uncertain until September

I made the post about June layoffs (as that was traditionally the time for mass layoffs) and I was wrong about the dates. Also was not certain where the layoffs would occur. I was going off the latest 10K and 10Q to make a prediction.

Also taking in to account the fact that Oracle has no real flagship products in the cloud and is not part of the other major cloud providers. It has lost relevance and market share. Oracle has declined from 36.1% of the total database market share in 2017 to only 20.6% in 2021 and is falling rapidly.

The biggest DBMS market story continues to be the enormous impact of revenue shifting to the cloud. In 2021, revenue for managed cloud services (dbPaaS) rose to $39.2B – it now represents over 49% of all DBMS revenue. The growth has been stunning

Oracle has completely missed almost all of the cloud growth and will continue to do so until they agree to run the Oracle database software for a reasonable price in the other major cloud providers (AWS, Azure, GCP). I don't see this happening.... ever.

https://blogs.gartner.com/merv-adrian/2022/04/16/dbms-market-transformation-2021-the-big-picture/

With uncertain economic conditions Oracle can only do one thing to strengthen its earning per share and that is cut costs. Sadly some of the biggest fixed costs are employees. What has caught me off guard and what I did not expect was the layoffs globally.

It means that Oracle has done some calculations and they realize that all of there software products are legacy and not growing. Oracle will not die any time soon. The idea is to prop it up and shrink the employee base while they milk the existing customer base.

We wont know the extent of the layoffs until the 2023 Q1 10K due out in September. I do believe this was planned and timed to fly under the radar so no one would see it coming. The 2023 Q1 10K will give a good clue as to how much was spent on the severance packages. Most curious to see if it was in fact $1 Billion as was rumored.

I do expect more layoffs in August, I expect them to end in September.

by Harbinger
| 3332 views | | 8 replies (last August 4, 2022) | Reply
Post ID: @OP+1i2T2emR
Comment! It's anonymous!

8 replies (most recent on top)

Good information here. The post on OCI should be particularly illuminating for those in OCI.

by Anonymous
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Post ID: @1xnn+1i2T2emR

A note on OCI. LE believes he can win the cloud race with superior cloud software. SC believes that its not wise to invest billions in infrastructure in the hopes that customers may adopt Oracle Cloud. So you will continue to have what you have always had, a few rented Equinix datacenters running the OCI.

This is supposed to compete with the hundreds of billions of dollars invested in real cloud datacenters by Amazon, Google and Microsoft.

Really?

If you don't get it, which LE clearly does not. Infrastructure and networking matters. Right now if you have modern cloud native applications running in AWS and you need to get information out of an Oracle database running in OCI your options are limited. You can route traffic over the public internet or pay to lay dark fiber or some sort of dedicated network from the AWS datacenter to the Equinix datacenter. Why incur this extra cost.

I was employed at Oracle back in 2017 when we sold a 15k OCI deal to a customer and this issue came up. The cost of the direct connect was 50k a month. So our deal went from 15k to 615k in the blink of an eye. Do you think the customer bought? Nope they walked to a real cloud provider.

Its easer and cheaper to use a NoSQL solution like MongoDB, Couchbase etc... and rewrite the app to use JSON instead of relational than to deal with this nonsense.

TK was president of Oracle back then and he quit and walked to Google. He knew it was total nonsense.

I am not saying anything bad about the Oracle OCI software. I am simply referring to the laws of physics. The speed of light and network latency are real physical issues not solved in anyway by better software.

The cool kids with the real clouds are developing newer and better cloud offerings everyday. Their software with machine learning, data warehousing, databases, networking, and scalability and high availability offering is growing by leaps and bounds. They are even building fast private network connections between the major cloud providers.

You think Oracle OCI can keep up with all of that? No way possible.

OCI can not possibly compete now or ever. This is why Oracle is losing database market share. It is quickly fading into obscurity as all legacy technologies eventually do. Working for Oracle means the norm is continued layoffs. The employee base will become cheaper, and fewer to keep profitability high as Oracle shrinks into greatness.

by Harbinger
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Post ID: @niy+1i2T2emR

OCI? Nobody wants OCI. No market share. Customers are adverse to anything Oracle. It's why they do all the deals with support counting toward OCI credits. Most customers wanted to kick Oracle out. The only saving grace were the sales team that won their trust even while selling subpar service compared to the competitions or should I state leaders. Oracle will never gain cloud market. Customers mainly will go with AWS or Azure if one pi---s them off. Cloud applications or SaaS are just acquired products and they still feel that way. Oracle touts all the investments but after all these years the SaaS applications still feel like separate products and getting data out of them are totally different. Oracle boast of all this record cloud revenue but doesn't share any of that with its soldiers. No raises ever. Shrinking bonuses. Not sure why people want to stay. It wore me down.

by Anonymous
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Post ID: @fbi+1i2T2emR

All these posts clearly by people outside OCI.

by Anonymous
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Post ID: @bdz+1i2T2emR

The reamings have only just begun! Prepare to subordinate yourself again and again. Despite what anybody else says, this is your new and ongoing role, so learn to relax and enjoy.

by Anonymous
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Post ID: @hvn+1i2T2emR

Oracle should give up on the IaaS dream and sell OCI to Azure or AWS. Snowflake and Databricks have shown that you can be successful. Just be a software company again. If Oracle had any sense, they would take the huge amount of SaaS spend and use it to play Microsoft and AWS off against each other. Maybe even bring Google into the mix and Alibaba for China.... They could extract huge concessions from AWS and Azure.

by Anonymous
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Post ID: @kaf+1i2T2emR
The craziest part of all of this is that Oracle is known as a company that practically perfected the database. Now the company owns 1/5th of the market.

When you treat your customers like a piggy bank to be cracked. You overcharge and under deliver for you product and service (especially your service), tell you customer to suck it up when they expose bugs, Spring spurious audits to force companies to "buy" cloud credits, like some kind of protection racket, you begin to realize Oracle's customers tolerate Oracle and most outright hate the company. the only thing keeping the lights on are legacy support because the companies still using the products are too scared to migrate off for fear of intolerable disruptions. Now that there are more tools available to minimize this, many companies are breaking free and going elsewhere. New companies are avoiding Oracle like a bad disease and older ones are discovering they can live without them.

Oracle is like the anti-toyota and anti-honda. If you have ever studied the Toyota production system you'd realize Oracle does just about everything the opposite. and it shows.

Yes, Oracle is not going away anytime soon, they will be around for a long time, maybe outlive me. But they will be a shadow of their former selves. a niche player. This will happen even faster once LE assumes room temperature. I would say they would get sold, but what is it do they have would anyone would want?

by Anonymous
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Post ID: @vwf+1i2T2emR

The craziest part of all of this is that Oracle is known as a company that practically perfected the database. Now the company owns 1/5th of the market.

It's clear from all this that the company has no clue what it's doing anymore.

  • Back office cloud applications? Sure, if you believe in ERP, HCM, or SCM (but Workday and SAP are on the heels)
  • Java? That's something that Google took as lemons and made lemonade with.
  • Healthcare data? Before 2021, nobody knew Oracle cared that deeply. The depth isn't there.
  • Cloud infrastructure? With the tepid market share vs GCP, AWS, and Azure, it seems like forever before anyone catches up.
  • Open source software like Sun? I'll let myself out.

Before this week, if you asked me where this company was going, I would have said business apps in the cloud with a dash of infrastructure and code. After this week's madness, I don't think this company has a clue of what it wants to be. Everyone who got laid off was done a favor, and if you survived, I hope you are looking. It's not going to be pretty for awhile.

by Anonymous
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Post ID: @jzh+1i2T2emR

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