Oracle Corp. is reportedly quietly launching a new round of layoffs in hopes of further squeezing the company’s costs. While the size and scope of the layoffs are unclear, internal emails indicate that some employees at the database giant’s North American Cloud Infrastructure and Technology (NACT) division received layoff notices earlier this week on Monday. Posts claiming to have been laid off by Oracle can also be found on the anonymous Web forum TheLayoff.com and the professional social networking site LinkedIn.
Available sources suggest that some employees affected by the layoffs can now find new positions within Oracle by Monday, Oct. 31. But at least one employee who has just been laid off said he was notified that his employment relationship with Oracle would be terminated next Monday.
Oracle has yet to comment.
Recent reports suggest that Oracle’s employee morale has been particularly low since August. That’s because the company had quietly gone through a round of layoffs at the time, potentially affecting thousands of employees around the world.
Oracle’s NACT division, headed by Oracle executive vice president Mark Hura, has acquired many of the tech giant’s cloud computing projects, including cloud databases and applications. It is worth noting that NACT and Oracle Cloud Infrastructure (OCI), led by Oracle Executive Vice President Clay Magouyrk, are two different divisions, while OCI is designed to benchmark market leader Amazon AWS and create a strategic sector. It’s unclear if OCI will also cut jobs.
In addition to the layoffs, Oracle introduced new hiring restrictions in September, causing panic within the company, with many worried that mass layoffs could come at any time. Under the new hiring restrictions, Oracle will focus on hiring outside of costly tech hubs like San Francisco or Seattle. Oracle has struggled to control costs since it recently bought case database company Cerner for $28.3 billion.
In its most recent filing with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC), Oracle expects to incur $519 million in restructuring charges during the fiscal year ending in August 2023. The filing also disclosed that the cost was “primarily related to employee severance pay.”
“They just put too much money into Cerner, so they’re tightening their belts to pay for it,” said an Oracle recruiter.
