Reports: Oracle makes round of US layoffs

Oracle has laid off select staff at its San Francisco Bay Area offices this week, according to reports from The information and Bloomberg.

The Bloomberg report quotation marks former senior manager of engineering sales, saying the company is specifically reorganizing its customer experience group.

Several Oracle employees reached out to LinkedIn this week to announce that they have been released. These employees worked primarily as solution engineers and in sales roles, with the exception of one who worked in the content and marketing department of Oracle’s customer experience (CX) business and NetSuite.

“Having observed similar corrections in the past, my suspicion is this [Oracle] will focus on marketing, administrative and some sales staff,” said Carl Olofson, vice president of research at IDC. “This could be in response to recession concerns or as part of a restructuring plan based on a structure that is more fully managed by the cloud.”

In July, The Information had reported that Oracle wants to cut jobs in an effort to cut $1 billion in costs after its $28.3 billion acquisition of health data specialist Cerner, which closed in the second week of June.

“At this time, Oracle is facing multiple headwinds, including the Cerner acquisition, US inflation, foreign currency issues and a slowdown in deal speeds, which will reduce revenue next year,” said Hyoun Park, principal analyst at Amalgam Insight . Oracle committed a $15 billion short-term loan in March to support the Cerner acquisition, “which should be repaid relatively quickly,” he added.

“It is not unusual for large enterprises to reallocate their capital and talent as their strategic needs change. Right now, Oracle is making a big push into both cloud and healthcare, which will affect employees in core application product divisions that are seen as cash cows,” Park said.

Meanwhile, Oracle is making a push to build and market its cloud services. Recently it sharply reduced the price from its special OCI region and also plans to build 10 new cloud regions.

When contacted, Oracle said it would not be willing to offer any comment on the round of layoffs at this time.