Thread regarding Oracle Corp. layoffs

@VoQixM2-7wcr It's really sad, isn't it. Ridiculous. But, I don't think it's going to change. LE is an id--t.

it's not a problem of products portfolio (which, I think, it's only average at best, apart from the DB and the Exa offering) but of myopic (at best) corporate strategy.

I have been involved in at least 3 very large strategic deals that have been stopped by upper management because they wanted them to go to cloud, even if it was the wrong choice for the particular cusotmer.

last one was a Q2 60M$ deal (ULA+Exa+Sparc) that has been stopped and swapped to a different team (formal reason: to get more coordination between the lobs) because there was too little cloud.... last I heard, all Sparc disappeared (5M$), almost all Exa disappeared (20M$), ULA become almost all cloud credit and ExaCC... the deal moved from an onprem 60M$ (that customer was willing to pay) to an almost all cloud 40M$.... net result: customer stopped the project to start an internal evaluation.... translation: they are looking ways to adopt different technologies than Oracle because they DO NOT WANT CLOUD, and they said this very clearly to everyone in Oracle.

I cannot imagine something more stupid than this. better force customer to buy what they don't want to buy rather than sell an onprem only deal.

I think there is still time to maximize on premise revenue with the products portfolio we still have. It might take a refresh of a few of them, but that's certainly doable. I think it's Oracle's only option to buy more time while they sort out the cloud strategy.

On-prem has been destroyed. Important people have left, lots moved to India, and no one there has any idea. This is over. In addition, sales/support also being destroyed.

It can't be fixed at this point.

We have done a Stephen Elop and burned our platform. See how well that worked for Nokia!

Technical debt- we have alot of technical debt in on prem and have not been serving it but have instead spent those $$$ propping up or ask. How do you propose we keep those customers after ignoring them and our products for so long. The wheels are in motion already at many of them for other alternatives. We not only burned that bridge but we doused it in gasoline, plastic explosives and announced to the world... It's not our focus. How do you undo THAT! Face it... The ship has sailed.

be patient, you will discover everything in a couple of weeks

@VoQixM2-3raw are you the Larry?

are you trolling or what?? why you keep misunderstanding on purpose what's been written here??

it's Oracle itself saying that HW @ Oracle is dead.

and if you are not aware of this - because maybe you don't have the right informations - then there is a very easy and quick solution.

go to OOW, and listen to the keynotes and the sessions in the Moscone center.

the HW-less strategy will be depicted vey clearly, and also someone without any real informations will be able to see the full picture of the real Oracle strategy on the short/mid term.

@VoQixM2-3ykq I disagree. HW is not DEAD, Oracle's HW should not be treated as DEAD.

Outsourcing everything has been proved DEAD. You won't be able to control how many bugs or fw versions from the community product or vendor's next version will get everything fixed story. A fully customized HW and SW system is very popular not within traditional industry but also in may internet companies. If you don't even understand what I am saying, please take some time learn something at code.fb.com (this is just an example). You may complain that their system is not storage, not high efficiency computing resource or etc. but these systems work well, save tons of money. We as Oracle, we are providing lots of more valuable products than just ads, right? Why we cannot do better than them? Outsourcing HW is a stupid idea. I mean it.

I disagree with those that claim it's to late. It's simple.

1. We have an existing portfolio of products that is actually quite good. Let the sales team sell them on premise. Don't incentivize sales to force customers into a cloud solution they don't want. Sell the customer whatever solution works best for them.

2. Spend a small amount of R&D to refresh the current product line, not everything, just those products that sell well.

3. Take all that money you make from the renewed on premise sales and go build out your cloud infrastructure and design.

Instead Oracle panicked, killed off on premise sales (our money stream), and try to send customers into a cloud infrastructure that wasn't quite ready and not what they needed at this time. Let's just keep the customer happy with on premise, and then give them a transition path when they are ready. Happy customers are repeat customers.

@VoQixM2-3ykq

That was McNeeley's vision, to outsource everything and just be a small holding type company. Look how well that worked out.

It's too late to go back to on-prem. Lots of people are gone. It's too late. It's too late for pretty much everything.

@VoQixM2-2ocg : have you even read the post? HW AT ORACLE is dead, not HW is dead. jeez, at least try to read before commenting.

the Oracle long term strategy is to be a full virtual (i.e. cloud) services shop. HW is not needed, much better focus on cloud services and get the needed inhouse infrastructre from someone else or even complete outsource to an IaaS provier. this "vision" has a final stage in becoming a very small skeletonic company, with the maximum profitability possible.

this is something than even Google or Microsoft consider not viable, but our 3 elders geniuses think they are much ahead and so Oracle can do, because we are so much more clever, bold and astute.

arrogant and stupd I would say, but hey, I'm not a genius.

We are all on the same page, except our super high management team. How could we improve???

This isn't so much about hardware, rather it's about Oracle's insistence on chasing Cloud. More importantly trying to be AWS. Both on the x86 and SPARC side, Oracle backed away from it's "bread and butter" on premise sales. Sure it may not be a s-xy area, but it was paying the bills while the Cloud story got sorted out. There are still plenty of customers that are happy to buy on premise and Oracle has a great portfolio of products which they could simply refresh and continue that revenue stream while the Cloud folks get their act together. It's a small adjustment, mostly in thinking by a few execs. At one time LE did have this vision of "Hardware and Software Complete", I fear others have pulled him away from one of his basic tenancies of owning the entire stack and delivering value (i.e. Apple).

"The big data architecture was designed 12+ years ago, it is good for handling Google's file system 64M block size"

Google invented Big Data architectures and databases back then because nothing else could scale to the necessary levels. Google has since advanced or even moved off of those architectures because it is continuing to innovate. It's all about distributed computing and Google designs all of its own hardware.

How is Oracle hardware anything like this? It emphasizes vertical scaling and, as a result, is super expensive. It's a good fit for large, monolithic ERP solutions that were designed prior to microservices and always-on application design approaches, so there are customers that will still buy it. Go ahead and adjust the focus to sell more on-prem stuff, but don't believe that it is going to be a growth market or that those who invest their careers are easily going to find work elsewhere.

Hardware innovation Oracle, really? Is Oracle doing anything the Dell or any other commodity hardware vendor isn't?

Come on dude, there are lots of true innovations in the HW area. Even without the newer architecture or innovated design, we still have to keep our produce up-to-date. Not only HW companies but also Internet companies are investing NVME, NVME over F, FPGA, persistent memory, etc... If you think those are all 'DEAD' technology. You are fake tech-guy. The big data architecture was designed 12+ years ago, it is good for handling Google's file system 64M block size, but come on, you should be able to understand that the current AWS is just an Internet based hardware rental services. It includes nothing but HW & SW! How could you say HW is dead!

http://investor.oracle.com/events-and-presentations/event-details/2018/Q1-FY19-Earnings/default.aspx

QFY19 : 904M$ HW + 813M$ Svcs

HW is slowly going down YoY, minus 4% on average, much less than overall market, and given this is made with old systems and no R&D investment, it's a good number. moreover, by IDC estimates, IBM is still making btwn 2x and 3x, and if in a different position and with corp back support maybe we could be able to steal some of this.

unfortunately, it will not happen.

HW is dead at Oracle, including ES, and only because of a very shortsighted and stupid/arrogant decision that Oracle must have been #1 in cloud... after Oracle itself (i.e. LE) said in 2010 that cloud is a stupid hype.

nope, HW will slowly die at Oracle. maybe 3 years. maybe a little bit more. but do not expect that someone will rethink the long strategy only because in Q1 Systems LOB made a big overachievement WW (+140% in EMEA!!!)

"How much of that $1 billion revenue do you think came from hardware support contracts? "

How about you enlighten us? Just how many ZFSSA's, Superclusters, Miniclusters, etc. did they sell? Or maybe you have no idea and are just making up numbers?

RIFed lots of genius. They won't come back. This is not about the product, but the people.

This is true. Also drove out a lot of good people with dirty tricks and backstabbing. The rush and obsession with the "cloud", has caused a lot stupidity.

Some Amazon AWS experts are fake

This is something I've wondered about. Who would leave amazon to work at Oracle? Perhaps those people who don't really know what they are doing.... possibly amazon rejects? If they stay, that is surely the case.

Some Amazon AWS experts are fake, don't even understand the whole software hardware stack. While EMC and IBM are doing well, we should also put more resources to sell the mature products. Now, as of today, LE put money from one pocket to another pocket, and RIFed lots of genius. They won't come back. This is not about the product, but the people.

How much of that $1 billion revenue do you think came from hardware support contracts? SuperCluster has always been a dog, plain and simple. Profit margins in the hardware business are just too low drive the growth rate ORCL needs to keep the stock price up.

"Record number of SuperClusters last quarter... is that 5?"

Given that the hw division had almost $1B in revenue last quarter, I strongly suspect that the number was more than five.

Pfffttttt... yeah focus on ON prem... hahahahahaha yeah thats a good idea...

Not

"Say what you will, but it's my understanding that they sold a record number of SuperClusters last quarter."

Just furthers the original point it seems that on premise money is being left on the table for companies like Dell and IBM to take. Makes no sense at all. If you have customers lining up to buy your equipment and service contracts for years why not take the money? Hopefully after this re-org settles out, someone takes a closer look at keeping on premise customers happy and capitalizing on it for the next few years while the cloud situation gets sorted out. There's lots of revenue here for very little effort, and no R&D cost.

Record number of SuperClusters last quarter... is that 5?

Say what you will, but it's my understanding that they sold a record number of SuperClusters last quarter.

Oracle problem is not product alone, they have let go lots of good talents past 2 years or so. Product alone doesn’t make a good org, the people matters.

Agree. And more worse situation after the big RIF, more people move after that. Don't ask me why.

Oracle problem is not product alone, they have let go lots of good talents past 2 years or so. Product alone doesn’t make a good org, the people matters.

"There are plenty of large financial, government, education, and Fortune 500 companies that need and want on-prem, and are happy to pay the equipment and recurring service costs for decades to come."

In the majority of these use cases, the single biggest "need" to stay on-prem is the perception of a loss of control/security when moving to the Cloud. Have you looked at the security measures that the top 3 Cloud suppliers take? Have you compared their security team sizes to what any of these organizations have? It is very hard to make the argument that on-premise is a better choice. Many large financial, government, education and Fortune 500 companies have been having those conversations in the past year and they are beginning to see that they don't need on-prem. They are also beginning to see that their competition, both existing and new disruptors, are leveraging Cloud to gain an advantage.

That isn't to say that there won't be on-premise infrastructure on some level. Manufacturing companies need some local systems to keep the factory running. Retailers need to continue to operate even if the network goes does. However, having massive database processing, data warehouse, ERP, CRM, etc. located on-prem (e.g. most of the stuff that Oracle specializes in) isn't going to be as efficient, scalable or strategic as having it in the Cloud. I'm sure that Oracle, Dell, Cisco and others will continue to try to sow FUD about moving to the Cloud, but having large systems on-premise is going to be a diminishing market.

Even so, plenty of really large companies have been able to pay their executives really well while the business slowly loses ground over time (e.g IBM, Sears, etc.). Oracle could stay afloat for quite a while, but the growth days are in the past as are raises, good commissions/bonuses, perks, etc. If you are really, really good at selling on-prem, you might be able to stick around for a while. But you'll have to put up with the culture that flows down from the top, you might end up being let go as jobs shift to younger/cheaper employees and you risk having to eventually face a world where on-prem skills aren't in demand.

Stock prices are based on the expectation of future value and Oracle is no different. Revenue from on-premise sales has been shrinking as customers move to a Cloud model and, as a result, Oracle had several choices:

1. Keep the on-premise focus and watch the stock fall

2. Invest heavily in Cloud to try to compete with other top tier Cloud companies

3. Cloud-wash the products, financially engineer numbers and market a future of Oracle Cloud

4. Invest strategically in niches where Oracle stands a chance (e.g. SaaS for eBusiness apps and PaaS for database as a service)

1 is a non-starter. LE's net worth and ego are tightly linked to the stock price.

Oracle gave #2 a look, but never really invested significantly. In reality, it couldn't. Look at the valuations and revenue that Amazon, Microsoft and Google have. Oracle isn't in the same league.

What Oracle has been doing the past few years is largely #3 -- playing games to keep the stock price up. It doesn't have the networks, data centers or core technology to effectively compete broadly, so it has been stalling for time. As part of that strategy, MH has been doing his typical thing and cutting costs left and right in order to manage margins and to make the financials not look as bad as they really are.

What Oracle seems to be realizing is that their best short-term strategy is to hold on to as many of their customers as possible and pushing SaaS and DBaaS are likely the options where they can do that and where Wall Street will give them credit for being a "Cloud" company with some future potential.

Looks like do whatever looks like a savvy $$$$$ or fun/status move for him and everyone else be d@mn€d. That would actually be pretty shocking to churn and burn your creation after 40 years.

Too late. All the bridges were burned. No turning back.

What is WWLED?

I see where you are going with this. WWLED?