Oracle staffers in Europe weather cloudy job cuts: As many as 1,300 workers face chop after sales slide

Oracle is reportedly preparing to cut as many as 1,300 jobs across Europe. Staff at Oracle Ireland were invited to a meeting on Wednesday afternoon where they were informed of the planned cuts, the Irish Times reports. This is consistent with an unauthenticated memo posted to TheLayoff.com, an online forum for the discussion …

[Pascal Monett]

"talking about aggressive hiring"

And now they're talking about rebalancing spending to revenue. It's not 'agressive layoffs', oh no dear, that wouldn't sound pretty.

As far as headcount is concerned, Oracle seems to be on a bit of a roller coaster at this time. But as far as aggressiveness is concerned, Oracle is only on the High setting.

It seems that strong-arming your customers into accepting a Cloud license doesn't really work, eh, Larry ?

[Chris G]

Re: "talking about aggressive hiring"

It also seems that strong arming successful and senior sales people into the street is bad for sales force morale and leads to decline.

[Anonymous Coward]

Business failing ?

So that's why Larry is looking for a free handout from Google meanwhile completely ruing APIs for everyone else with stupid copyright.

[Anonymous Coward]

Oracle can only decline

I guess the number of new Oracle customers is negative.

No sane person would ever buy Oracle, the company is known to extort its customers, and getting every cent out of them.

They are all about their profit, less about the customer.

Some years back, traffic lights reported something to an Oracle server, and Oracle wanted per user license for every single user of the traffic light. The solution was easy, just ditch Oracle forever. Larryes does not care, he has more money than he can ever spend

[a_yank_lurker]

Re: Oracle can only decline

One problem for Larry and his Minions is Oracle is a relational database and there are other very good relational databases as options to ditch or avoid the Minions. True migrating from relational one db to another is a royal PITA but it is doable if the Minions are too obnoxious. Also, there are other cloud vendors who at least have a reputation of not being anywhere near as odious as the Minions. So they face a potential double whammy, customers can become ex-customers and there are other better perceived cloudy options.

[Anonymous Coward]

Re: Oracle can only decline

I hate to say it because I've had dealings with Oracle and I can't stand them as a company, but their RDBMS is the best in the business. The guys who wrote it really knew what they're doing. Neither SQL Server or SAP/Sybase are quite as good and the IBM and AWS cloud stuff is frankly a joke.

[TVU]

Re: Oracle can only decline

I agree but their business practices and the way they can treat their customers is appalling. Personally, I would sacrifice some efficiency in order to have absolutely nothing to do with Oracle.

[Anonymous Coward]

Re: Oracle can only decline

The question I suppose

is the competition good enough for your business needs?

What is the TCO for each DB?

Rather than what is the most technically advanced on-prem SQL relational DB

[steamnut]

It's a trend that will not reverse

Oracle's reputation for an aggressive licencing regime with subtle "gotchas" has ensured that new businesses are not putting Oracle into their database plans.

There are lots of database alternatives around, some free, and there is no longer the imperative to go for Oracle. Back in the day it was said that "no one got fired for buying IBM"; with Oracle being a solid database from a large (ie not likely to go bust) company then this was the database of choice - then.

Despite Oracle's denials about it's sales practices the rumour mill is fairly solid. So, new businesses look to other database sources. This means that Oracle's existing customer base is going to slowly shrink. The Cloud has better alternatives which is why Oracle tries to coerce their existing customers to use it.

Every empire has it's day and I can only see this one entering a period of slow decline. It's no wonder they were desperate to get the US JEDI contract.

[TVU]

Oracle staffers in Europe weather cloudy job cuts...

I am now going to quote the wise sage Yoda:

"Work you for Larry's Oracle, shafted you will get".

[Anonymous Coward]

Re: Oracle staffers in Europe weather cloudy job cuts...

>"Work you for Larry's Oracle, shafted you will get".

Don't forget the customers too.

[Groove-Cat]

Re: Oracle staffers in Europe weather cloudy job cuts...

As an ex Oracle staffer, shafted is kind.....

What was that unofficial mantra? "If you are not sales or marketing, you are considered an overhead"

[onemark03]

Oracle staffers in ... job cuts...

On a more general note, I suspect that many employers the world over will be using this Corona-virus pandemic as an excuse for getting rid of staff they might not have been able to get rid of more easily beforehand.

[DrXym]

I'm shocked

So Oracle's existing customers weren't rushing to buy cloud services from a company that has routinely shafted them for years? This is a shocking revelation.

[Vulture@C64]

Whilst I'm sorry for the individual people who will be made redundant, I'm not in any way surprised Orible is in trouble. They have failed to create anything genuinely new or original for years and just screw their customers - that has been proven to not be a good business model.

[Anonymous Coward]

Fool me once...

Oracle me once, shame on you.

Oracle me twice, shame on me.

[Strider]

Rebalancing resources

It is fairly well understood that there is a decline in traditional on premise business and growth in the cloud business. It makes sense that oracle and any other company should restructure its resources periodically to where it is getting the revenue from.