I just got back from a long discussion with a friend that has some pretty high connections inside Oracle. Hardware is a thing of the past, SUN HW / Solaris is officially dead, you will see heavy the layoffs in the next couple of weeks. HW is hit especially engineered systems and anything on premises. Over 70% of the Sales organization was slated to be replaced in FY18. About 30% has been replaced already. Expect a good number of the current sales team reps and pre-sales to be let go over the next couple of quarters. The replacement is with a mix of new blood (from college) and experienced cloud professionals. If you have more than a few years with Oracle this is seen as a bad thing. Make no doubt this is most likely your last year at Oracle. There is no surviving this.
Oracle is getting beat by the competition at every turn. AWS vs Oracle Cloud, PeopleSoft vs Workday, Siebel vs Salesforce, Oracle RDMBS vs MongoDB and host of other NoSQL companies. The flagship RDBMS is losing share to opensource like PostgreSQL, and competitors like IBM and EMC that came out with Neteeza and Greenplum. All of the technology acquired by Oracle in recent years is seen as old, rigid and inflexible. This perception is held by the top level executives. They are desperately trying to graft on a start up mentality. Sad thing is they have no plan as to what that thing is other than "cloud."
Oracle's life support is the 22% support revenue stream that has a strangle hold on its customer's budgets. They are all looking for ways out. They are finding tways out through other technologies outside Oracle. They are taking advantage of rapid development through agile programming, opensource, commodity hardware and software as a service. Oracle executives see this clearly and want to be a part of it. But, here is the catch. Oracle is investing less than 10% of what its competetors are in to infrastructure. Customers that wish to "kick the tires" as a car metaphor can not do so with Oracle. They can try out the competitor's cloud, but not Oracle's.
LE trusts MH. This is a problem as MH does not have a clue. MH says that Oracle needs to become more agile and more like a start up. So you hire college kids and people from start ups to bring new blood into the equation. This does make sense, but only if you retain the season sales force to continue the old business. No one person can keep up with all the technologies that Oracle has aquired. Its over 100 companies. That is why you have the "Oracle Bus," a boat load of people calling into the customer. Its really hundreds of products that need expertise. The call has been made that this strategy does not work, and that one person with limited sales knowledge tied to an ECA with even less depth across the myriad stack of hundreds of technologies will now sell to the customer. It wont work and we all know it, but at the executive level HW is a box, and software is just the business problem it solves. How hard can it be?
Compound this with the lack of investment in the cloud. SC is holding the purse strings and has valid points. Why invest when we have no customers? Naturally there are three problems with enterprise customers moving to the oracle cloud. The first is that the tech stack is not yet fully integrated, the second is that the infrastructure is still being rolled out and the third is customer perception. To address the customer perception Oracle is "cloud washing" revenue to overstate cloud adoption. Customers are allowed to reduce 50% of their support costs for ever dollar they invest in cloud. Oracle is offering cloud credits and counting it as cloud revenue, when in reality its just spinning support revenue as a new line item.
Point being Oracle has turned away from its flag ship product and it has no new products to replace it. 12cR2 has come out and Oracle has done little to nothing to help adoption in its customer base. It has turned its back on its core product as it beats a quick retreat. It has nothing of substance in its cloud offering. Compare this to the true continuous integration for agile development, rapid development builds and deployments, AI offerings, SAAS offerings and integrations offered by its cloud competitors (AWS, GCP, and Azure). The writing is on the wall. As sales decline and fail to meet target, the sales force will be replaced. The blood letting begins a new at the end of this week.
https://seekingalpha.com/article/4102185-oracle-needs-one-critical-segment-keep-growing
New hires are coming on board to replace you. The article below is true, is not marketing hype. No notice has been given to the industry, but Oracle is officially out of the hardware business. All things Sun are going away. Sparc is gone, Solaris is dead the engineers and sales teams will be let go starting this Friday. Java (yes even Java) is now a thing of the past, no new development effort is to be continued outside of core functionality required by Oracle. Expect heavy cuts on everything related to Sun starting Friday Sept 1st. Moving boxes, and spreadsheets have been delivered to the SVPs.
Sales on all product teams across the entire company will be let go based on Q1 performance. ECAs will be cut based on Q1 performance, Cloud sales will be let go based on Q1 Performance and the trend will continue into Q2 and Q3. The shift is to have sales teams replaced as rapidly as possible. Many teams have been presented with technical counterparts from india. They are offered as help, but in reality they are replacements.
https://finance.yahoo.com/news/oracle-hiring-five-thousand-cloud-120000036.html
The hiring has a dual purpose, the first is to belay the Trump administration and the market so no one notices the layoffs. The second is to explain away some issues with Oracle cloud adoption. This is the "pivotal" year as the employees at Oracle are rotated out. Its not going to be pleasant and there will be little to no survivors for anyone hired before 2014.