OR was the root cause of his own demise. He had an amazing ability to impress people who don't know better, which is mostly those above him. Through a combination of Machiavellian scheming and blind luck OR sliced through Teradata management ranks like a hot knife through butter. Somehow he was hired with virtually no experience in management and immediately put in charge of ~1000 people circa 2014. For often unknown reasons a lot of his peers and bosses left over the next few years. OR got incredibly lucky when HW blew himself up, because HW was not fond of OR. Had HW become CEO then TDC would be very profitable cash cow, yet still with a declining business due to poor handing of Hadoop and Cloud and not recognizing that cloud was the more serious long term threat. In fact, they should just hire HW now as CEO. HW understands the business and has strong financial acumen. A book could be written about OR's mistakes. VL mentioned in the earnings call that OR could not work through people. That is a complete understatement. Malignant narcissists compromise and undercut all those in their orbit. It is a surprise that VL is just realizing this now as complaints should have reached the board years ago. Somehow OR convinced VL that it was belly-aching and they both messaged that if people could not get aligned then they should leave.
It is surprising that the layoffs are going ahead since the choice of layoff targets was likely done by OR to be aligned with his failed strategy. So that means it's likely that a lot of the wrong people will be let go. Keep the folks that understand the Teradata database and ecosystem. Eliminate all this failing nonsense like Vantage and the other bizarre initiatives OR put in place. Everthing he did was for show to market himself. Nothing he did was for customers, employees, or investors.
Advice to VL: Hire HW as CEO straight away. Eliminate any new initiatives OR proposed because he had a nonsensical vision of what is practical and what the market wants. Just go back to basics and stem the tide of revenue loss the best you can. This can still be a profitable but shrinking business for years to come. And stop wasting money on consultants! Find the people who understand the core business and listen to them.