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Economy
Oracle swings axe on cloud infrastructure corps amid possible bloodbath at Big Red
2019-03-27
[The Register] 0.4 to 10% of corporate wage slaves could be up for the chop.

Oracle has laid off about 40 people in its Cloud Infrastructure (OCI) group in Seattle ‐ and on Friday began notifying about 250 workers at its Redwood City facility and about 100 at its Santa Clara location, both in California, that they will be let go in May.

These US-based layoffs are part of a broad round of job cuts around the globe this month, said to range from 500 to 14,000 at the database giant. The biz employs about 140,000 worldwide.

The Register spoke with an individual affected by the layoff who confirmed that about 40 people in Oracle's cloud group have been let go. The insider, who asked not to be named, recounted being summoned to an office last week with other team members, and being told to leave that afternoon.

The dismissal includes people who now face concerns over whether they can remain in the US because they're no longer employed and are here in the States on work visas. Some will have very little time to find work before having to leave the US.

It's official
Oracle on Thursday filed paperwork with California's Employment Development Department signaling its intent to terminate employees at its Redwood City and Santa Clara sites.
Posted by:Besoeker

#13  I worked for Sun when Oracle bought them. They were not exactly dead but had been on life support for nearly a decade. Hard to sell big Iron Unix Servers when folks can buy a dozen Linux machines for a fraction of the price. Also hard, after the dot-com bust, to compete against your own systems that are only a year or two old being resold.

Great place to work though.
Posted by: rjschwarz   2019-03-27 18:14  

#12  Oracle DB, great, especially if you dont mind typing.

The rest of their software is meh.
Posted by: Bright Pebbles   2019-03-27 17:58  

#11  If IBM f*cks up Red Hat the same way, there will be angry geeks in the corridors between the cubicles for sure...
Posted by: M. Murcek   2019-03-27 14:58  

#10  SUN was dead before Oracle bought it.
Posted by: Abu Uluque   2019-03-27 13:33  

#9  A lot of people will always hate Oracle for buying and then killing Sun (not totally fair, I think they only killed it after they couldn't make a profit with it) and for how they have handled Java (part of the Sun acquisition) Lots of otherwise scientific minded people get really upset over these corporate soap operas...
Posted by: M. Murcek   2019-03-27 12:25  

#8  My experience with Oracle database software was always good and that's how they got to be a software giant. But many of their other products were rushed to market half-baked and it showed. If they rushed their cloud to market that way I could understand customers running back to Google. Personally, I'd rather buy the disk space and have it running at a facility that is under my control than letting the likes of folks at Google, Oracle or any of the rest of them manage it for me. Can't trust them.
Posted by: Abu Uluque   2019-03-27 10:57  

#7  Here's the part that surprised me:

Oracle on Thursday filed paperwork with California's Employment Development Department signaling its intent to terminate employees at its Redwood City and Santa Clara sites.

Then again, it's CA - maybe I shouldn't be surprised. Maybe it's a requirement for publicly traded companies but it's the first I've heard of a requirement like this.
Posted by: Raj   2019-03-27 10:51  

#6  Interestingly, the cloud providers work very hard at reliability, energy efficiency and of course features, so their black swan will have to come from another direction. Government interference in terms of privacy is a good candidate...
Posted by: M. Murcek   2019-03-27 08:59  

#5  What hammered the Detroit Big Three was the '73 oil embargo. American's discovered the Japanese cars which not only gave great gas mileage, but were engineered for reliability (cause the domestic market couldn't afford to replace theirs every three years), quality assemblage (it worked right on delivery), and a very short invoice sticker that didn't nickel and dime you for every part of the vehicle. It took a long time for the final bite in 2008, but the writing was on the wall and corporate choose to ignore the very real need for reform rather than show.

An example of the black swan effect. Complacency creates the environment.
Posted by: Procopius2k   2019-03-27 08:43  

#4  And comparing Oracle to AMC or Studebaker in the market under discussion is a bit generous.
Posted by: M. Murcek   2019-03-27 08:21  

#3  I should have added, the "rule of three" posits a free market framework. When was that ever true of the auto industry in this country?
Posted by: M. Murcek   2019-03-27 08:19  

#2  ...like the Big Three in Detroit?
Posted by: Procopius2k   2019-03-27 07:53  

#1  The "rule of three" in economics states that in any given industry there are three major players and then all the rest. In cloud, the three are Amazon, Microsoft and Google. Of course that could change, in theory. In practice, not very likely.
Posted by: M. Murcek   2019-03-27 07:09  

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