Biggest reorg (layoff) at Oracle in ten years this June.

The execs are waiting for the deals to close in Q4, and then the biggest reorg in ten years will happen this June. This post is based on rumors gained from people speaking to the executives inside and outside oracle. This perspective has been generated based on the lack of progress on cloud sales. Oracle is no longer an Apps company, Database Company or middle-ware company. Oracle is now a next gen cloud company and everyone in sales who is not cloud savvy will no longer have a job.

Rumor has it that only one sales rep will exist per customer. Gone are the days for an App Rep, Core tech Rep, Hardware Rep and Fusion Middle ware rep. Just one sales rep! The execs are listening to the customer on this one.

The same slashing of jobs will happen in Sales Engineering. All the pillar Sales Engineers will be replaced by one Enterprise Cloud Architect (ECA). The ECA will handle the whole stack of everything. The pillar sales engineers will be let go as they know virtually nothing about cloud. The current SE's in the all the pillar's will go away. A few will be allowed to finish up any lingering POCs before they are cut. The may last until Q2... November at the latest.

All on premises sales (95% of Oracle's revenue) will be handled by the college kids and new recruits at Oracle Digital / Direct which earn less than half of field sales reps and engineers.

Since everything is cloud based now, a customer proof of concept can be performed by a less expensive sales engineer operating out of India. A college kid hired at Oracle Digital can handle the power points and click through demos. Customer's can now self serve and create all the services they need by a few clicks of the buttons in the cloud. Who needs to know all the details? Everything is now automated and orchestrated.

Oracle no longer needs seasoned sales reps and sales engineers with deep knowledge of oracle products. All that is needed is one sales rep onsite with an ECA who knows everything for the cloud. A webex from Oracle Digital with slides and click through demos should be enough for on premises sales.

The ECAs that were retrained internally will be cut as well if they don't have at least one cloud deal closed. They have to complete all the training, and pass the review board where they must know all the cloud offerings, middle-ware offerings and core tech offerings. Current thinking is that the ECAs have failed to close enough cloud deals and should be replaced by cloud solution architects from Amazon and Google, because they understand cloud far better than Oracle ECAs.

Over two thirds of the sales force will be reduced this summer. The Sales force will go from 4 key reps to one, the pillars will go away and be replaced by one ECA. If you think one ECA can't know everything you feelings are shared by higher management. Management is sorely disappointed by the lack of cloud deals closed by the ECAs. A great number of current ECAs were eliminated by the first "coaching session" to prep them for the review board that takes place this May. They found that few ECA's did really know all the Oracle products in great depth. The review board process will be much like the show "survivor." Miss a question on anything and you are voted off the Oracle island.

The ECAs will be gutted as well. Again think is less than 30 percent will remain. According to rumors of managements perception of the current group of ECAs, they lack a deep understanding of all oracle products, they don't seem to really know cloud, and they have FAILED to make the cloud quotas assigned to them. They should be replaced by sales engineers from Google and Amazon who do know cloud. It would be easier to train Google and AWS solution architects on Oracle technologies than for the Oracle ECAs to learn cloud.

Goodbye to over 60% of the Oracle sales force! You are to blame for the lack of progress on cloud. Cloud is easy and you can't sell it. The new bare metal guys hired from AWS, Google and Azure to develop the new Infrastructure as a service did a great job. Current thinking is the same thing will happen if Oracle hires sales reps and engineers from these cloud companies. They have been and continue to hire from these companies. Just about every job listing at oracle has the key word cloud in it.

https://oracle.taleo.net/careersection/2/jobsearch.ftl?lang=en

If you are in Oracle field sales, best of luck to you! Get your resumes and linked in profiles updated, start interviewing. You have 4 weeks left to find something.

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What validation, supporting material and facts back up this statement?

This is unfortunately what you get when you bring in a boatload of morons who drown HP into the ground, they just keep doing what they know best - destroying companies

There were Enterprise Cloud Architect (ECA) review boards in the US in March. Some ECAs were told that they did not pass would not have a job in June. Some of them have already found jobs with other companies. It is true that they expect the ECAs to know the entire stack which is literally over 100 very complex technical products. Upper management has no clue as to how weak the cloud products are, how strong AWS is as a competitor (a senior sales VP says "AWS is just for two developers in a garage"), or how complicated it is to sell anything at Oracle due to complex licensing policies and massive bureaucratic entanglements. Upper management still acts like arrogant market leaders in a high margin business, when Oracle isn't even a top 5 vendor in IaaS/PaaS. The problem is not bad sales reps. Oracle is several years late to the market and not spending nearly enough on data centers. Analysts like Gartner are negative about Oracle IaaS, and therefore, customers see Oracle as too risky. They just hired a new sales team to sell IaaS consisting primarily of young sales reps cast off from IBM and Google. Nobody is buying just Oracle IaaS. The only real cloud deals involve database as a service and/or Exadata as a service, so it's still about database, yet database expertise is no longer valued. There are ECA openings, but it is very difficult to fill them as experienced cloud architects do not want to come to Oracle. Why would anyone from AWS want to come to a supposed cloud company that isn't even listed in the Gartner Magic Quadrant in IaaS?

Oracle will announce layoffs and the stock will soar on the good news.

If the layoff is as large as you suggest, won't Oracle need to provide public notice per the Worker Adjustment and Retraining Notification (WARN) Act? My guess is they will continue layoffs but in numbers just under the WARN threshold.

Would be more than happy to, unfortunately requires LE to fire those idiots and he doesn't haven either the balls or the brains, tragic!

Indeed and now I know why Oracle recruiters were the most arrogant POS to deal with. They low ball offers too. Hmm well the large companies besides Oracle like HDS, Intel, IBM, HP, the list goes on are taking this approach toward employees. Look to smaller more agile up and coming tech companies for opportunities that is best bet. Of course cheap labor via outsourcing and H1b does not help American engineers either.

Unfortunately, for him and for oracle employees, LE is an senile old dude, trying to enjoy a few more year here on earth with the help of Viagra and Botox, doesn't have it in him to replace the incompetent morons he's put in charge of the company. This pooch is dead, move to a company with good leadership!

Oracle needs innovative leadership. That's not MH, SC, or TK. Oracle is run like a holding company. They won't be able to innovate without the right leadership, which they don't have.

LE need to grow a set of balls and cut from the top. Without that, no amount of hiring from Amazon, Microsoft, and Google can save them.

Whether they execute this plan or not, oracle is F:ed, sh--ty cloud products and idiots in top management, nothing that the employees can fix, so everybody is screwed. It all starts at the top! When all is said and done LE F:ed himself

I have no doubt this summary is what the three stooges plan to, unfortunately it will not save oracle. Yes it will massively reduce costs, it will also massively reduce revenues. Bye bye oracle, this is what happened when the company is run by one senile and arrogant owner supported by greedy morons.

The same execs who brought it to this point are going to fix it? And how, by hiring from AWS, Azure, GC so those guys can carry the current execs? Are you kidding? If this is the plan, and I don't doubt it's the only one they could come up with, it's not good news for Oracle. It means they can't build anything. As for the employees not being technical savvy enough for the Cloud, of course, nobody is, look around in MH's org, pre-sales, post-sales, support, CSMs, 1 in 10 can deal with Cloud's complexity and I saw some of those few abandoning ship already giving the stress put on them by all the dinosaurs hanging around.

TK should pack his bags since many of the cloud products his team built absolutely s---. If the product s---s, you can't sell it. If you do, you're a sleazy used car salesperson.

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Biggest reorg (layoff) at Oracle in ten years this June.

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