Oracle is laying off thousands of employees worldwide. It began last Friday, according to a report on the websites of the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE), with layoffs in Mexico, India, and the US. Oracle has 140,000 employees worldwide. According to reports by company employees in various forums, the current wave of layoffs is likely to amount to up to 10% of the company's total staff.
No employees in Israel have been laid off in the current wave. Oracle has 400 employees in its Oracle Israel subsidiary, managed by Oracle Israel country leader Uzi Navon. 250 of Oracle's employees in Israel are programmers in four centers: Tel Aviv, Petah Tikva, Ra'anana, and Beersheva. The other employees in Israel work in marketing, support, installing, and training for the company's customers in Israel.
In response, Oracle Israel drew attention to the statement by parent company spokesperson Deborah Hellinger, who stated, "As our cloud business grows, we will continually balance our resources and restructure our development group to help ensure we have the right people delivering the best cloud products to our customers around the world."
Up until now, according to a report on The Register website, 40 employees on Oracle's cloud infrastructure team in Seattle, 250 in Redwood City, 100 in Santa Clara, 50 in Mexico, 50 in Hampshire, UK and 100 in India have been fired. The layoffs include various positions, among them software developers, data scientists, business analysts, graphic designers, IT managers, market researchers, communications specialists, product managers, quality assurance personnel, applications developers, systems managers, sales personnel, and web designers.
According to a report on the the layoff.com website, a forum for discussion by employees, Oracle began firing employees from expensive departments in order to cut costs. These included the company's cloud infrastructure department (OCI), which is currently losing money. According to this week's report, layoffs will be based on the employees' performance. Each department is being forced to get rid of its most expensive employees and those whose performance is the poorest. Further reports on this website reveal that most of those laid off are the veteran and older employees on the teams affected, while younger employees, whose employment is less costly, are staying at the company.
A letter published on layoff.com allegedly sent to Oracle employees via e-mail by Don Johnson, the company's EVP cloud infrastructure states, "Today’s changes within OCI will better align with Larry's (Oracle founder Larry Ellison, Y.Y.) vision of the business… It will streamline our products and services, focus investments on our most strategic priorities, and help us to more effectively and rapidly deliver the full promise and reach of Oracle's Gen 2 Cloud."
Oracle has been buying back its shares in recent months in order to support its share price, following a decline in its profits. The company's acquisitions to date in the tens of billions increased its profit per share by 19% at the end of 2019. Amazon, one of Oracle's most important customers, has been reducing its use of Oracle's infrastructure in recent months and switching to its own database infrastructure.
Amazon also beat out Oracle in a $10 billion Pentagon tender, thereby depriving Oracle of another large customer. Oracle is currently accusing Amazon of improper conduct in the tender, claiming that a former Amazon employee worked for the Pentagon and was among those who formulated the tender, according to a report by The New York Times.
Published by Globes, Israel business news - en.globes.co.il - on March 26, 2019
© Copyright of Globes Publisher Itonut (1983) Ltd. 2019