Oracle lied: Database giant is axing hundreds of staff – at least 450 in its hardware div

Oracle will cut hundreds of jobs from its embattled hardware division in California, a move the tech goliath had previously denied. About 450 people from the company's hardware operation in Santa Clara will get pink slips, according to a letter from Oracle to the California Employment Development Department seen by The Mercury …

[Anonymous Coward]

El Reg pushes Oracle, and Oracle responds with layoffs!

"Toward of the end of last year, The Register asked Oracle to confirm or deny if it will lay off staff, particularly those in its hardware and Solaris divisions. Oracle PR ignored our emails and calls, then denied there would be any changes to head counts and Solaris."

Then, Oracle thought to itself; "perhaps those chaps at El Reg were on to something..." Then come the layoffs.

I don't need to tell you folks how to put 2 and 2 together to make 4. I tell you there is a pattern here! Something is fishy in a certain Nordic nation.

[TVU]

Oracle LIED: Database giant IS axing hundreds of staff

On the potential bright side is that lower income and reduced profits for Oracle might mean less money to play with and fewer vexatious lawsuits from litigious Larry.

[Captain DaFt]

Re: Oracle LIED: Database giant IS axing hundreds of staff

"On the potential bright side is that lower income and reduced profits for Oracle might mean less money to play with and fewer vexatious lawsuits from litigious Larry."

Unfortunately, lower income and reduced profits are what usually causes a company to "Cry HAVOC! and let slip the lawyers of IP!"

Fat happy CEOs just threaten litigation, losing CEOs act like mad dogs and attack everything in sight.

[The_Idiot]

Re: Oracle LIED: Database giant IS axing hundreds of staff

Lied? Oh, that's _so_ 2016. They simply told an 'alternate truth'! That's the 2017 way - and guv'mint approved!

Sigh. I only wish I _was_ joking... :-(.

[Anonymous Coward]

Re: Oracle LIED: Database giant IS axing hundreds of staff

Sometimes the "truth" isn't honest and the "alternative truth" actually is honest e.g. the mainstream media being humiliated by alt-media, which is still busy revealing it's direct lies, deception and dishonest omission.

What that Trump snipe is really about is that the Left is still hysterically drowning in-de-nile for all of its (self-)deceptions and lies; it's got thuggish violent too, because they can't honestly win the arguments!

I saw avoidable decline and stagnation, so I'm not surprised that Oracle continue to gut the business with a hatchet.

[Anonymous Coward]

And Whither SPARC?

This does not bode well.

[Anonymous Coward]

Re: And Whither SPARC?

SPARC: Dead.

[hplasm]

Re: And Whither SPARC?

SPARC: Withered

[Anonymous Coward]

Re: And Whither SPARC?

Sadly, agree, unless something momentous in pipeline - but not even heard rumours of that from anywhere.

[asdf]

Re: And Whither SPARC?

POSIX: Dead

FIFY. RHEL on commodity x64 hardware coming soon to a mission critical role near you (please please don't try to tell me how POSIX a GNOME 3 based Linux distro is here in 2017, do go on how great it is root has the bash shell by default).

[Zippy's Sausage Factory]

Re: And Whither SPARC?

I always had a hankering for someone to licence SPARC and produce a low-cost version, then stuff a Linux (or even Open Solaris) based SPARC PC out the door (probably using as many off the shelf components as possible). No chances of MS snarling about the Windows tax, because it can't run it. I'd have probably bought one, five or ten years ago.

[Anonymous Coward]

Re: And Whither SPARC?

Maybe Oracle Intel is finally dead on the appliances with Solaris & Linux on SPARC and M7 for high end appliances and S7 for low end appliances...

[toughluck]

26 quarters still deserves a mention

Oracle completed the Sun Microsystems acquisition in July 2010. It kept spending money on developing Sun hardware for 6.5 years. That's 6.5 years more than almost every analyst predicted that Oracle would maintain interest in hardware.

I'm pretty sure everyone just said that Oracle was after Java and control of MySQL, and that they would axe or sell off everything else right after the acquisition closes.

Oracle spent huge sums of money to turn around the hardware business. If it wasn't for cloud, I figure they would have succeeded, too. Just look at what they achieved with SPARC over the last few years -- from the underperforming T2, unsuccessful Rock and SPARC M line licensed from Fujitsu to T7, M7 and S7 which are excellent processors in their own right.

Same goes for pretty much every hardware line that Sun used to supply. It's clear Sun did not have the kind of money that was necessary to turn around the hardware business, and Oracle did. However, Oracle doesn't have the kind of clout they would need to turn around the mass migration to cloud.

You still have to hand it to them that they did soldier on for 6.5 years.

[Pascal Monett]

"[..] politically motivated, based on false allegations, and wholly without merit."

And you won't be laying anyone off either, right ? Oh wait, I get it, that was true for 2016.

Now that we're in 2017, they can axe away with a clear . . nope, doesn't apply either.

Ah, to live in the lofty spheres of existence where other lives are just numbers on a spreadsheet to be jumbled about while sipping a drink until the desired result is obtained . . .

[Anonymous Coward]

Repeat until staff = 0

Except for HR, Lawyers, PR and the 1% Execs.

The worst kind of spreadsheet monkey management logic.

[James 51]

It will be interesting to see if/how Trump responds to this. Will he attack US companies that are losing money for layoffs? Would the story be different if they said the labour costs were the killer and it would make money in India but not here and either way the jobs in the US were gone?

[Anonymous Blowhard]

"It will be interesting to see if/how Trump responds to this."

I expect he won't respond at all; these are "excess truths", i.e. things that he doesn't want to hear, so why bother saying anything?

[Stevie]

Bah!

Besides, El Reg belongs to the old school of new school current affairs journalism and is obviously therefore Fake News.

[Jove]

The author of this piece would n't be a former Oracle staffer by any chance? I detect a slight hint of bitterness and bias.

[Anonymous Coward]

> I detect a slight hint of bitterness and bias.

Reality is biased against Oracle's Alternative Reality.

[Mike Shepherd]

Job advice

It looks like the best job advice is "start looking as soon as you hear the rumours". The reassurances are worth nothing.

[Stevie]

Re: Job advice

Always was. I first saw this in '81. In the UK.

[Anonymous Coward]

Oracle M&A

I fully expect Oracle this year to make a storage acquisition. They are just clearing the deck for the new employees.

[J. R. Hartley]

Oracle really are scum

They really are.

[Anonymous Coward]

Announce stuff - seriously?

What company - ever - announces restructures, job cuts etc early? Not even internally are such things announced as there are legal ramifications and ideas for change may not even happen. I've seen it slip one and key staff jumped fast and never regretted it.

So to then give a company grief for not sharing confidential info with an IT news site is a bit odd...

Coming from someone who has been axed out of the blue and is not in the 1% (best thing that ever happened to me!)

[Anonymous Coward]

Oracle is lying and will always lie, it's just what (((they))) do.

there's much more coming down the pipeline. next round is late March, that much is confirmed. The org of 5500+ under JF is being cut to a taget headcount of 2200. They are liars and have been filling the ranks with L1 visa abuse, Oracle commits hundreds of cases of immigration and visa fraud every single day and needs to be punished. America First. Americans First.

There is a massive kickback scheme in place with the Indians coming over, Indian managers are getting kickbacks for hiring other Indians to the point where they are forging documents to make them appear qualified, when they are not qualified at all. Their racket is to scam their performance reports until they can get into a management position that does not require coding skills (which they are horrible at)

[Anonymous Coward]

Loved my time at Sun

It was pretty good times just after the Oracle acquisition as well. Feel bad for the good ones who believed the lies and didn't bail out before now. JF never had a good strategy for the SPARC engineering group and his lieutenant MH was a worthless empty suit who managed by intimidation and couldn't lead his way out of a paper bag. I hope MH was selected to go down with his ship of yes-men