Reports: Oracle makes a round of layoffs in the US

Oracle has laid off selected staff across its San Francisco Bay Area offices this week, according to reports from The Information and Bloomberg.

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

Several Oracle employees took to LinkedIn this week to announce that they had been let go. These employees were mostly working as solutions engineers and in sales roles, except for one, who was working in the content and marketing division across Oracle’s customer experience (CX) business and NetSuite.

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

In July, The Information had reported that Oracle was looking to trim jobs in an effort to cut expenditure by $1 billion following the $28.3 billion acquisition of healthcare data specialist Cerner that closed in the second week of June.

“At this time, Oracle is running into multiple headwinds, including the Cerner acquisition, US inflation, foreign exchange issues, and slowing deal velocity that will lower revenues for the next year,” said Hyoun Park, principal analyst at Amalgam Insight. Oracle took out a $15 billion short-term loan commitment in March to support the Cerner acquisition “which needs to be paid off relatively quickly,” he added.

“It is not uncommon for large enterprises to reallocate their capital and talent as their strategic needs change. Oracle is currently making a big push towards both cloud and healthcare, which will affect employees in core apps product departments that are seen as cash cows,” Park said.

Meanwhile, Oracle has been making a push towards building out and marketing its cloud services. Recently, it heavily slashed the price of its OCI dedicated region and also plans to build out 10 new cloud regions.

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