Ok, so we've just had a bunch of newbies in Seattle, a non-entity of a city for Oracle until recently, stage a major coup. Is this plan to transition to a Cloud company actually the plan to transition away from Larry? Or, maybe some techie kids just hoodwinked the old man who thinks he stills a savvy kid and the accountant who thinks she's a tech leader. They are living the techie dream in Seattle. Huge salaries and equity, moved up from basically just developers to technical leaders of one of the largest software companies in the world.
This is the way for Larry to exit. Transition to a cloud company, autonomous database as part of OCI (until he's gone and they can bring in fresh DB blood too), then move the technical center of the company to Seattle and the rest will follow. Larry bows out and the change is complete. BoD picks new CEOs - maybe even installs some new cloud-savvy board members and completely revamps sales to handle the new cloud sales world.
The axe will need to fall many times to transition Oracle to a cloud company so if this is what is really happening, get ready. Think about all the on-premise systems, Java, middleware, enterprise apps, all the sales and support and consulting infrastucture built globally that keeps that running at customer sites. That's tens of thousands of people.
Is Oracle really committed to that?