Scrambling for cloud relevance, Oracle hires... 2,000? Yes, that sounds like a nice round number

What Larry snatcheth away with one hand, he giveth with another. Oracle is hiring a couple of thousand infrastructure services sales bods and has promised to swing open its data centre doors to more cloud regions. Big Red said last night it is seeking 2,000 newbies for roles including software development, cloud operations and …

[Doctor Syntax]

Is it possible one of the big companies has finally realised that getting rid of people doesn't help you do business?

Or is it that they've decided to replace expensive people with cheaper ones?

[Julz]

Big Red Modus Operandi

I would suspect its the second option. I was about to make a similar comment.

[GrapeBunch]

Re: Big Red Modus Operandi

£Metoo.

Maybe they also futzed around with pensions. If you get a pension after x years, then letting employees go after x-1 years for whatever made-up reason is a real magnet to slimy bean-counters. No insult intended towards aquafaba. That's a reason to like national voluntary pension systems, such as Canada's RRSP.

[Anonymous Coward]

Re: Big Red Modus Operandi

No pensions in the US.

[David 132]

Re: Big Red Modus Operandi

Well, here's the clue:

The new positions will be based in Seattle, San Francisco's Bay area and India.

So that'll be 50 people each in Seattle and SF - and I'm being generous there - just for appearances, and upwards of 1,900 script-readers in the latter location.

[Overcharged Aussie]

Re: Big Red Modus Operandi

They have a bunch of office space they own in Santa Clara (ex Sun)

[Anonymous Coward]

Re: Big Red Modus Operandi

> I would suspect its the second option

Likewise. Especially as newbies won't be aware of the many and various ways that Oracle shafts their sales force.

[Anonymous Coward]

From what I understand, 2'000 new hires is not much compared to what the first players are investing. They should have hired way more, and kept all the old ones.

[astounded1]

Larry is 75 years old. Does anyone here think adding mostly 2,000 bods in India is going to do anything to increase Oracle's "cloud" offerings before Larry moves on to the actual cloud?

The cloud game is all over for Oracle as a meaningful player. Over in Ashburn, VA. they are cross connecting their "cloud" to Azure. Thus opening up all Oracle customers to the expanding delights of an actual global scale cloud platform imbued with every sort of application you can think up and owned by Microsoft.

As Oracle slips further off into last gen status, its share price falls to the level where it makes sense for Microsoft to pay to buy the Oracle customer base and consolidate its position in cloud world vs. AWS.

I do love the silly idea that Larry thinks the shareholders are so stupid that this stunt will prove Oracle is serious about building "the world's best cloud" as he says.

Larry, Larry, Larry - go sailing while you can still hoist a jib and sell the biz if you can.

[Duncan Macdonald]

Poison Cloud

Even Microsoft do not want to be tainted by the nasty reputation of Oracle.

[Doctor Syntax]

Larry is 75 years old. Does anyone here think adding mostly 2,000 bods in India is going to do anything to increase Oracle's "cloud" offerings before Larry moves on to the actual cloud?

Oi! I'm strongly in favour of 75 year olds having many years left in front of them.

[Anonymous Coward]

The only "Oracle Cloud" (sic) users.. will be the ones strong armed in to it by Oracle sales / licencing bully boys.

AWS is king, and will be for a very very long time...

AWS (and VMware) are at the center of the IT universe right now.

[Uncle Ron]

"40,000 cloud customers"

"40,000 cloud customers?" I don't know WTF that means. In the entire world, there aren't 40,000 enterprise businesses that I would cross the street to do sell to. If you're counting welding shops and insurance agents and funeral homes, at the very least, WHO CARES? Selling and supporting to those kinds of businesses is a loser. Oracle can have 'em. A much more meaningful statistic would maybe be "Enterprise Average Quarterly Invoice" or some such. If that was the metric, I bet IBM would be #1. Huh?

[Smartypantz]

The last Software vendor

Oracle, hated as it is, will quite probably be remembered as the last software vendor. When we are all enslaved to the singular cloud, which computes everything by means of non-disclosed "algorithms" "in the cloud", we will think back with fondness to the days of free computing on and proprietary software!