Oracle Lays Off Hundreds in Cloud Transition

Oracle reportedly laid off hundreds of employees this week as it continues shifting resources from old business to cloud computing.

The company wouldn’t provide any specifics about where the layoffs took place or what types of positions were impacted.

Gadgets Now reported that Oracle laid off nearly 100 employees in India as part of a global restructuring effort to gear up its cloud offerings. Software developers, quality assurance and documentation professionals were impacted by the layoffs, it said.

It also reported about 500 people are said to be impacted in the United States.

Oracle spokesperson Deborah Hellinger would only say, “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.”

Charlotte Dunlap, principal analyst at GlobalData, said “we are not seeing a pattern relative to specific product lines.”

“[We] see Oracle’s latest layoffs driven by corporate finance,’’ she said.

According to Oracle’s third-quarter 2019 earnings, reported on March 13, revenue for the quarter totaled $9.6 billion, up 3 percent from last year. During its earnings conference call, Mark Hurd, Oracle’s CEO, said the company continues to “grow revenue faster than market and we have an enormous opportunity ahead of us” in enterprise resource planning (ERP) and human capital management (HCM).

“So overall, a solid quarter and we hit our revenue targets and saw 12 percent earnings per share (EPS) growth,” he said. “Looking forward, I do expect FY 2020 revenue growth will be higher than FY 2019.”

Oracle chairman and CTO Larry Ellison said the company’s future rests on two strategic businesses, cloud applications and cloud infrastructure.

“The growth in our cloud applications business has been driven by our Fusion suite and NetSuite,” he said. “Both the Fusion suite of applications and NetSuite are growing very, very rapidly.”