Hundreds Of Oracle Layoffs Revealed To California Regulator

Oracle has revealed it is cutting hundreds of jobs across the U.S. as it looks to improve its financials in what appears to be part of a much larger workforce restructuring.

The software giant reported mass layoffs last week to the State of California in accordance with the WARN Act, which requires a 60-day notice before 50 or more employees are terminated in a 30-day period from a specific facility.

The Redwood City, Calif.-based company told the California Employment Development Department that on May 21, it will permanently layoff 255 workers in its Redwood City headquarters, and another 97 in the nearby Santa Clara offices.

[Related: SAP Plans Restructuring That Includes 4,400 Job Cuts]

Oracle, which has 140,000 employees worldwide, did not immediately reply to a request for comment on Tuesday. Last week, company spokesperson Deborah Hellinger shared a prepared statement: "As our cloud business grows, we will continually balance our resources and restructure our development group to help ensure we have the right people delivering the best cloud products to our customers around the world."

In both letters to California's employment regulator, Oracle wrote it is "reevaluating its product focus and skill set gaps, and for these reasons, has decided to lay off certain employees in the Product Development organization. It is anticipated that these layoffs will be permanent."

The vast majority of those losing their jobs in both facilities are listed as software developers, according to the letters.

Those reported layoffs, however, appear only a component of a much-larger international workforce reduction, with the website thelayoff.com abuzz in recent weeks with anonymous postings about changes at Oracle. Cuts have also reportedly taken place at the company’s Dyn unit in Manchester, N.H., at an office in Seattle affecting 40 cloud infrastructure team workers and outside the U.S.

"They've been laying off quite heavily," said one former Oracle employee who lost his job in September as part of a layoff round that fell under the WARN Act's reporting criteria.

Those cuts late last year were "a fairly substantial RIF [Reduction in Force]," he said, asking to remain anonymous, but were distributed enough to avoid a WARN notice.

In that former Oracle employee's group, responsible for an aspect of software development around the Fusion application suite, about 25 percent of more than 100 employees were let go, including many senior people. At the same time, sales groups were also seeing "a lot of turmoil," he said.

Around the same time, Oracle was hiring new people, many of them engineers coming from Microsoft's Azure division and Amazon Web Services who demanded hefty salaries, that former employee told CRN. Those hires were an attempt to turn around a struggling cloud infrastructure services division, he said.

Talking to his former colleagues last week, that employee told CRN those current Oracle employees anticipate thousands of more jobs will go.

The CEO of a large Oracle partner with close ties to the company's internal employees told CRN many of those well-informed contacts expect between 5 and 10 percent of the workforce in North America to lose jobs.

At the same time, Oracle is also hiring, including many new employees from Microsoft who specialize in customer experience and marketing solutions, the partner, who also asked to remain anonymous, told CRN.