Oracle Lays Off Hundreds More Workers

Oracle reportedly is shutting down its flash storage division and cutting at least 300 workers.

This follows the company laying off hundreds of workers in California, including software and application developers, and others, in May.

According to a Blocks & Files report, employees were told of the layoffs on Thursday by Mike Workman, Oracle’s senior vice president of flash storage systems, via conference call. An Oracle employee told the publication about 300 workers are losing their jobs.

When asked about laying off employees, Oracle spokesperson Deborah Hellinger tells Channel Partners “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.”

Brad Shimmin, service director at GlobalData, said that Oracle taking a step back from hardware concerns such as flash storage is unfortunate, but not without precedent.

“We don’t have to look very far into the past to note similar efforts to refocus on profitable opportunities, as was the case back in 2017 when Oracle turned away from Solaris and Sparc,” he said. “Regardless, Oracle is not alone here. Very recently NetApp indicated that revenue from its all-flash and hybrid storage arrays was markedly down, citing global, macro-economic concerns as a main indicator. Dell likewise cited demand challenges for its flagging servers and storage revenues earlier this year. Does this point toward a retrenchment among technology providers concerning this important technology? Certainly not. We feel this is a simple, but unfortunate response to market pressures that have not favored Oracle.”

Oracle is the latest channel company to shed workers. Also this week, we learned that Cisco has laid off nearly 500 workers in California, including software engineering and technical engineering positions, amid reporting a drop in sales to service providers and falling sales in China.