Oracle Hiring 2,000 Workers for Cloud Division Months After Companywide Job Cuts

Just months after thousands of job cuts that affected much of its workforce, including within the cloud division, Oracle says it will hire almost 2,000 new employees.

On Oct. 8, Oracle made a splash with the announcement that it will bring on these additional workers for the Cloud Infrastructure business. The 42-year-old company, which has struggled to make good on its intent to dethrone Amazon Web Services, said it will hire experts in software development, and cloud and business operations to support customer growth, product innovation and data center expansion.

Oracle’s Don Johnson

“Cloud is still in its early days with less than 20% penetration today, and enterprises are just beginning to use cloud for mission-critical workloads,” Don Johnson, executive vice president, Oracle Cloud Infrastructure, said in a prepared statement. “Our aggressive hiring and growth plans are mapped to meet the needs of our customers, providing them reliability, high performance and robust security as they continue to move to the cloud.”

But the news seems to have been met with a healthy amount of skepticism.

As one example, Patrick Moorhead, president and principal analyst of Moorhead Insights & Strategy, told Channel Futures he still sees little evidence of Oracle making headway in the cloud.

Moor Insights’ Patrick Moorhead

“Oracle isn’t making a lot of headway on IaaS, but is in SaaS and database as a service, I see some real opportunity,” he said. “Oracle needs to focus on what it’s good at and not make big statements on what aren’t its core competencies. Oracle customers, I believe, would embrace that.”

Making a similar point, Bloomberg Businessweek noted that rather than keep trying to topple AWS, Oracle now is focused on remaining competitive in two of its core markets, databases and business applications.

“[B]ehind the hyperbole, Oracle has failed and its chairman has scaled back the company’s cloud ambitions,” journalist Nico Grant wrote. “Oracle’s journey to the cloud has been a Sisyphean saga, with the software giant bruised by false starts, dead ends and internal feuds.”

Along the way, Oracle Cloud remains in research firm Gartner’s “niche player” category, after falling from “Visionary.” Earlier this year, analysts wrote that even as Oracle Cloud’s strengths lie in targeting customers wanting to run Oracle’s software on its cloud IaaS platform, the company “is unlikely to ever be viewed by the market as a general-purpose provider of integrated IaaS and PaaS offerings.”

The reasons, Gartner said, boil down to the dominance of competitors including AWS, Microsoft Azure and Google Cloud, as well as Oracle’s late start in infrastructure “and the polarizing nature of Oracle in the minds of developers who often are the leading influencers for public cloud IaaS.”

As it seems to accept its inability to dominate the cloud market, Oracle appears to be making concessions through partnerships. The technology stalwart this summer started teaming up with rivals, starting with longtime foe Microsoft, as well as VMware and Box Inc. Partnerships are common in the cloud world, allowing vendors to make the most of their assets and fill in weaker gaps. For a while, though, Oracle was among the few cloud players not openly making such deals.

According to Barron’s, Seattle, the San Francisco Bay Area and India all will benefit from Oracle’s hiring strategy. Oracle also will add data centers in markets including Chile, Japan, South Africa, the United Arab Emirates, Asia and Europe. That number comes on top of the 12 Oracle already has opened this year. As of May 31, Oracle had 136,000 full-time staff; 18,000 were employed in cloud services and license support operations.