12 ms·

Update on Oracle Layoffs

68 points by jen20 10y ago

winteriscoming 10y ago
>> Still Unclear: The extent of near-term terminations. The fifty percent figure actually seems a bit high to us at present Is this 50% of Oracle, that's being speculated, or just some specific division within Oracle? 50% of Oracle, does seem very high.
- lemoncucumber 10y ago
  Sounds like it's just talking about the OS/hardware group(s) that Oracle acquired back when they bought Sun.
- dlgeek 10y ago
  Based solely on the article, it appears to be Oracle's Systems division which seems to own SPARC and Solaris - not sure what else without googling.
lkrubner 10y ago
Is Oracle doing well? Ten years ago I thought they were going to suffer as Open Source projects got better and better. That has not happened, or at least, that didn't happen nearly as fast as I thought it would. Oracle faces intense competition from Microsoft, and also from Open Source. The fact that Oracle has continued forward, seemingly unharmed, has so far struck me as something like a magic act. Are these layoffs a sign of Oracle in long term decay? Or is this merely typical corporate reorganization that any large company goes through every few years?
- spullara 10y ago
  Looks to me like they are reducing investment in SPARC and Solaris which makes a ton of sense to me.
  - holydude 10y ago
    Actually it does not make any sense.Solaris and the ecosystem was infinitely superior to anything out there (note: was). Oracle slowly killed it over time and did not embrace the change (like Microsoft did). If you have a really strong platform, technical superiority and you employ one of the best people in the world you must be in a deep shit if you screw up that much. Oracle positioned itself as an "Apple of enterprise software and services" but in a globalized world and the world of constant cost savings and outsourcing how can you justify buying a solution that only brings you revenue indirectly ? That's non sense. You can't only target fortune 100/500. You need to attract masses. Solaris was awesome. Sparc was awesome. But these are the things of the past. They should have attracted millions of Java developers to buy into their ecosystem. But they threw it away. They could have marketed Solaris as a better Linux and could have directly compete with AWS. They just needed to make Solaris bigger and popular. It was not that hard. They had better tech (eg zones vs docker) ages ago but they all threw it away.
    - lkrubner 10y ago
      "If you have a really strong platform, technical superiority and you employ one of the best people in the world you must be in a deep shit if you screw up that much." Well, by that line of reasoning, all the mistakes belong to Sun MicroSystems, not Oracle. And you actually make the case for what Oracle is doing -- trying to be the opposite of Sun.
      - holydude 10y ago
        Sun failed to monetize. Oracle failed to sustain the business and compete.
        rad_gruchalski 10y ago
        What business if Sun failed to monetize?
        holydude 10y ago
- holydude 10y ago
  It seems to me that Microsoft was Oracle of the present and it successfully transitioned itself to Microsoft that has embraced OSS and a better strategy to compete with others. Oracle is nowdays the Microsoft of the past. They can't seem to find a way to compete.
  - nraynaud 10y ago
    I am more cautious than you, I feel like Microsoft is trying something, but I'm not sure they succeeded yet.
- cocktailpeanuts 10y ago
  Oracles owns a lot of things, including MySQL and Java
  - dewiz 10y ago
    not sure what will remain of Java if Oracle starts charging people as I understand from this http://www.theregister.co.uk/2016/12/16/oracle_targets_java_users_non_compliance/ http://www.theregister.co.uk/2016/12/16/oracle_targets_java_...
    - holydude 10y ago
      People will flock to .NET (core) en masse. Or maybe not as they are charging only for certain set of sub products.
      - Gibbon1 10y ago
        I kinda wonder if enterprise customers[1] wouldn't also switch to Azul Systems version of Java. [1] Large corporations that will through money around to avoid trouble.
    - keypusher 10y ago
      java itself will be fine, people just use OpenJDK. It's some of the more advanced add-on features that are behind Oracle's paywall.
      - AstralStorm 10y ago
        Which, if actually useful, will be cloned and potentially opened.
      - deleted 10y ago
        [deleted]
      - pjmlp 10y ago
        Lets see for how long if Oracle removes it from the open or withdraws their developers, which happen to be the majority of them. Apparently people keep forgetting that OpenJDK is mostly developed by the same company and developers that they love to hate.
- toyg 10y ago
  It's the admission that the fullstack strategy has mostly failed, because they were too slow with it and by the time they got it to market, the landscape had irreparably changed. Solaris is basically legacy at this point, Exa machines don't sell enough, and anyway the company now wants to be a sort of "enterprise PaaS/SaaS provider", so the hardware side will keep getting cut. Tbh, this was on the cards for a while, in particular the Solaris bit - Linux now rules the datacentre, anything else is a hobby project.
- raesene6 10y ago
  For me Oracle has gone into the arena of companies like IBM and CA, where they pretty much only deal in enterprise IT scenarios and have no interest in small/end-user computing. Those companies can continue to make money on support and upgrades for a really long time as the pace of IT change in core enterprise systems is glacial. Personally I think this kind of high-end only strategy is a really bad idea, as it cuts off your supply of new people who know about your technology and are developing new software for your platforms. I always thought it was a big reason why Linux did so well against proprietary Unix systems like HPUX, Solaris, AIX etc, and in turn why they did well against even more closed-off systems like mainframe products. When it's hard for people to learn to use your product, due to expensive hardware and licensing fees and complex install processes, fewer people do it, which directly leads to increased costs to hire people in that arena. Compare that to Windows/Linux admins who can easily learn their craft on a cheap/free software and cheap hardware. Microsoft is a good example of a company who generally gets that problem despite playing in the enterprise space. You can get 180-day licenses and VM images for most of their products for free (completely fine for training), and there's a load of cheap/free training materials.
  - emmelaich 10y ago
    > Oracle has gone into the arena of companies like IBM and CA ... Exactly: http://www.dbms2.com/2015/12/31/oracle-as-the-new-ibm-has-a-long-decline-started/ http://www.dbms2.com/2015/12/31/oracle-as-the-new-ibm-has-a-... Personal story - they're pushing exadata and exalytics. Products based on 10 year products based on 15+ year old ideas.
  - sarajevo 10y ago
    The Enterprise ONLY strategy worked really well for Oracle (and other in this segment) for decades - Cloud certainly changed this forever, as it brings prices down and introduces more flexibility for the customer. It was only in 2014 that they started to feel the pinch as it relates to numbers (they knew it was coming long time ago - e.g., hence HANA for SAP and massive investments by Ellison into NetSuite) - over last six months things have accelerated to the point where they will have to make drastic cuts very quickly. So, the floor is dropping so fast all of them (large enterprise software players) are panicking... For example, look what we had at the same Oracle board, 11 months ago, it's a summary of Trip Chowdhry's (Industry analyst) predictions on how 2016 will play out - he was almost spot on: https://www.thelayoff.com/t/FFbUNu9 https://www.thelayoff.com/t/FFbUNu9 This trend will only accelerate in 2017 and it will take some major realignment effort for the companies at issue to survive. I'd give it up to 18 months for things to play out and I believe that we'll see a massive wave of mergers and large scale layoffs.
Tempest1981 10y ago
I had almost forgotten about the SPARC CPUs. Looks like they're approaching 4 GHz, using TSMCs fab.
- cmurf 10y ago
  And is open, not proprietary and royalty free.
  - tossedaway334 10y ago
    while there is an openSPARC core (that is around 10 years old), SPARC in general is not "open, not proprietary and royalty free."
    - cmurf 10y ago
      https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SPARC https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SPARC Open Yes, and royalty free
  - nraynaud 10y ago
    it looks like the ESA is doing development on OpenSPARC, the idea is that you need doubles for accurate space computations ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LEON https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LEON )
xer0x 10y ago
Is this a joke? I didn't realize Oracle continued working on all these SUN products.
rwmj 10y ago
Can someone explain why Oracle bought Sun and then screwed it all up? Was it a deliberate plan? Did they make money from it - and how?
- godmodus 10y ago
  they capitalized on Solaris (read SunOS) for many years, making sure the online documentation is obtuse and the best option for companies is to buy pricey support contracts. or send their DevOps to training courses, at a premium. They really made sure their online community/footprint was kept to a minimum - googlging issues and errors often led nowhere and left no choice but to call upon the support gods who'd login and fix things. the support folk were nice people - but it left you non the wiser about your issue. They also are capitalizing on Java using premium licensing if you're building with Oracle Java for the enterprise and planning to make money from it. my source is my own experience working with Solaris, which beyond ZFS and OracleDB, has very few things going for it - it made me feel like a bad Sysadmin, really. maybe i was, maybe it is a better OS than my experience taught me. now they've decided to go all cloud, and are killing Solaris. Java will probably still continue being developed.
  - vostok 10y ago
    > my source is my own experience working with Solaris, which beyond ZFS and OracleDB, has very few things going for it At a minimum, I feel like DTrace and Solaris Containers belong in that list too.
    - godmodus 10y ago
      i'm perhaps a bit biased towards FreeBSD/jails which was a more pleasant to work with. But ill agree, containers and Dtrace are just excellent.
- raesene6 10y ago
  I'd bet they make a load of cash from all the Enterprise support agreements that there are for Solaris systems in large enterprises. The pace of change on these things isn't high, so even if the costs go up it takes a long time for people to migrate off the platform.
WhiteSource1 10y ago
Looks like lots of trouble in the whole ERP space. SAP isn't seeing people moving to HANA. Panaya is struggling. And Oracle EBS market share is declining.
- orly_bookz 10y ago
  I don't know if all ERP software is like what I've seen but what I've seen is a hot mess. If your company is ever looking to move to the ERP space from a homegrown legacy system like we did, don't buy Infor. I'd rather deal with greenscreens for the next twenty years of my life than have to deal with Infor products and support for one more year. And I used to hate old, tired Big Iron.
  - WhiteSource1 10y ago
    Don't know anything about Infor but these are huge complex systems that people don't want to change because there is a huge risk of changes. So now they are falling behind, running up huge amounts of technical debt, and staying on old systems. I know with SAP most people have never heard of HANA and most of the companies that migrated did so because they were on very very old versions. Oracle EBS is pushing this migration to the cloud that is making a bit of traction with SMBs but not going anywhere in the enterprise and changes are difficult.
SQL2219 10y ago
https://www.indeed.com/jobtrends/q-Solaris.html https://www.indeed.com/jobtrends/q-Solaris.html
- Annatar 10y ago
  They are all dismally small, including Linux at ~1.4%: https://www.indeed.com/jobtrends/q-docker-q-kubernetes-q-smartos-q-solaris-q-linux-q-ubuntu-q-delphix.html https://www.indeed.com/jobtrends/q-docker-q-kubernetes-q-sma...
SQL2219 10y ago
https://www.indeed.com/jobtrends/q-oracle.html https://www.indeed.com/jobtrends/q-oracle.html

68 points by jen20 10y ago

>> Still Unclear: The extent of near-term terminations. The fifty percent figure actually seems a bit high to us at present Is this 50% of Oracle, that's being speculated, or just some specific division within Oracle? 50% of Oracle, does seem very high.

lemoncucumber 10y ago
Sounds like it's just talking about the OS/hardware group(s) that Oracle acquired back when they bought Sun.
dlgeek 10y ago
Based solely on the article, it appears to be Oracle's Systems division which seems to own SPARC and Solaris - not sure what else without googling.

lkrubner 10y ago

Is Oracle doing well? Ten years ago I thought they were going to suffer as Open Source projects got better and better. That has not happened, or at least, that didn't happen nearly as fast as I thought it would. Oracle faces intense competition from Microsoft, and also from Open Source. The fact that Oracle has continued forward, seemingly unharmed, has so far struck me as something like a magic act. Are these layoffs a sign of Oracle in long term decay? Or is this merely typical corporate reorganization that any large company goes through every few years?

spullara 10y ago
Looks to me like they are reducing investment in SPARC and Solaris which makes a ton of sense to me.
- holydude 10y ago
  Actually it does not make any sense.Solaris and the ecosystem was infinitely superior to anything out there (note: was). Oracle slowly killed it over time and did not embrace the change (like Microsoft did). If you have a really strong platform, technical superiority and you employ one of the best people in the world you must be in a deep shit if you screw up that much. Oracle positioned itself as an "Apple of enterprise software and services" but in a globalized world and the world of constant cost savings and outsourcing how can you justify buying a solution that only brings you revenue indirectly ? That's non sense. You can't only target fortune 100/500. You need to attract masses. Solaris was awesome. Sparc was awesome. But these are the things of the past. They should have attracted millions of Java developers to buy into their ecosystem. But they threw it away. They could have marketed Solaris as a better Linux and could have directly compete with AWS. They just needed to make Solaris bigger and popular. It was not that hard. They had better tech (eg zones vs docker) ages ago but they all threw it away.
  - lkrubner 10y ago
    "If you have a really strong platform, technical superiority and you employ one of the best people in the world you must be in a deep shit if you screw up that much." Well, by that line of reasoning, all the mistakes belong to Sun MicroSystems, not Oracle. And you actually make the case for what Oracle is doing -- trying to be the opposite of Sun.
    - holydude 10y ago
      Sun failed to monetize. Oracle failed to sustain the business and compete.
      - rad_gruchalski 10y ago
        What business if Sun failed to monetize?
        holydude 10y ago
holydude 10y ago
It seems to me that Microsoft was Oracle of the present and it successfully transitioned itself to Microsoft that has embraced OSS and a better strategy to compete with others. Oracle is nowdays the Microsoft of the past. They can't seem to find a way to compete.
- nraynaud 10y ago
  I am more cautious than you, I feel like Microsoft is trying something, but I'm not sure they succeeded yet.
cocktailpeanuts 10y ago
Oracles owns a lot of things, including MySQL and Java
- dewiz 10y ago
  not sure what will remain of Java if Oracle starts charging people as I understand from this http://www.theregister.co.uk/2016/12/16/oracle_targets_java_users_non_compliance/ http://www.theregister.co.uk/2016/12/16/oracle_targets_java_...
  - holydude 10y ago
    People will flock to .NET (core) en masse. Or maybe not as they are charging only for certain set of sub products.
    - Gibbon1 10y ago
      I kinda wonder if enterprise customers[1] wouldn't also switch to Azul Systems version of Java. [1] Large corporations that will through money around to avoid trouble.
  - keypusher 10y ago
    java itself will be fine, people just use OpenJDK. It's some of the more advanced add-on features that are behind Oracle's paywall.
    - AstralStorm 10y ago
      Which, if actually useful, will be cloned and potentially opened.
    - deleted 10y ago
      [deleted]
    - pjmlp 10y ago
      Lets see for how long if Oracle removes it from the open or withdraws their developers, which happen to be the majority of them. Apparently people keep forgetting that OpenJDK is mostly developed by the same company and developers that they love to hate.
toyg 10y ago
It's the admission that the fullstack strategy has mostly failed, because they were too slow with it and by the time they got it to market, the landscape had irreparably changed. Solaris is basically legacy at this point, Exa machines don't sell enough, and anyway the company now wants to be a sort of "enterprise PaaS/SaaS provider", so the hardware side will keep getting cut. Tbh, this was on the cards for a while, in particular the Solaris bit - Linux now rules the datacentre, anything else is a hobby project.
raesene6 10y ago
For me Oracle has gone into the arena of companies like IBM and CA, where they pretty much only deal in enterprise IT scenarios and have no interest in small/end-user computing. Those companies can continue to make money on support and upgrades for a really long time as the pace of IT change in core enterprise systems is glacial. Personally I think this kind of high-end only strategy is a really bad idea, as it cuts off your supply of new people who know about your technology and are developing new software for your platforms. I always thought it was a big reason why Linux did so well against proprietary Unix systems like HPUX, Solaris, AIX etc, and in turn why they did well against even more closed-off systems like mainframe products. When it's hard for people to learn to use your product, due to expensive hardware and licensing fees and complex install processes, fewer people do it, which directly leads to increased costs to hire people in that arena. Compare that to Windows/Linux admins who can easily learn their craft on a cheap/free software and cheap hardware. Microsoft is a good example of a company who generally gets that problem despite playing in the enterprise space. You can get 180-day licenses and VM images for most of their products for free (completely fine for training), and there's a load of cheap/free training materials.
- emmelaich 10y ago
  > Oracle has gone into the arena of companies like IBM and CA ... Exactly: http://www.dbms2.com/2015/12/31/oracle-as-the-new-ibm-has-a-long-decline-started/ http://www.dbms2.com/2015/12/31/oracle-as-the-new-ibm-has-a-... Personal story - they're pushing exadata and exalytics. Products based on 10 year products based on 15+ year old ideas.
- sarajevo 10y ago
  The Enterprise ONLY strategy worked really well for Oracle (and other in this segment) for decades - Cloud certainly changed this forever, as it brings prices down and introduces more flexibility for the customer. It was only in 2014 that they started to feel the pinch as it relates to numbers (they knew it was coming long time ago - e.g., hence HANA for SAP and massive investments by Ellison into NetSuite) - over last six months things have accelerated to the point where they will have to make drastic cuts very quickly. So, the floor is dropping so fast all of them (large enterprise software players) are panicking... For example, look what we had at the same Oracle board, 11 months ago, it's a summary of Trip Chowdhry's (Industry analyst) predictions on how 2016 will play out - he was almost spot on: https://www.thelayoff.com/t/FFbUNu9 https://www.thelayoff.com/t/FFbUNu9 This trend will only accelerate in 2017 and it will take some major realignment effort for the companies at issue to survive. I'd give it up to 18 months for things to play out and I believe that we'll see a massive wave of mergers and large scale layoffs.

Tempest1981 10y ago

I had almost forgotten about the SPARC CPUs. Looks like they're approaching 4 GHz, using TSMCs fab.

cmurf 10y ago
And is open, not proprietary and royalty free.
- tossedaway334 10y ago
  while there is an openSPARC core (that is around 10 years old), SPARC in general is not "open, not proprietary and royalty free."
  - cmurf 10y ago
    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SPARC https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SPARC Open Yes, and royalty free
- nraynaud 10y ago
  it looks like the ESA is doing development on OpenSPARC, the idea is that you need doubles for accurate space computations ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LEON https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LEON )

xer0x 10y ago

Is this a joke? I didn't realize Oracle continued working on all these SUN products.

rwmj 10y ago

Can someone explain why Oracle bought Sun and then screwed it all up? Was it a deliberate plan? Did they make money from it - and how?

godmodus 10y ago
they capitalized on Solaris (read SunOS) for many years, making sure the online documentation is obtuse and the best option for companies is to buy pricey support contracts. or send their DevOps to training courses, at a premium. They really made sure their online community/footprint was kept to a minimum - googlging issues and errors often led nowhere and left no choice but to call upon the support gods who'd login and fix things. the support folk were nice people - but it left you non the wiser about your issue. They also are capitalizing on Java using premium licensing if you're building with Oracle Java for the enterprise and planning to make money from it. my source is my own experience working with Solaris, which beyond ZFS and OracleDB, has very few things going for it - it made me feel like a bad Sysadmin, really. maybe i was, maybe it is a better OS than my experience taught me. now they've decided to go all cloud, and are killing Solaris. Java will probably still continue being developed.
- vostok 10y ago
  > my source is my own experience working with Solaris, which beyond ZFS and OracleDB, has very few things going for it At a minimum, I feel like DTrace and Solaris Containers belong in that list too.
  - godmodus 10y ago
    i'm perhaps a bit biased towards FreeBSD/jails which was a more pleasant to work with. But ill agree, containers and Dtrace are just excellent.
raesene6 10y ago
I'd bet they make a load of cash from all the Enterprise support agreements that there are for Solaris systems in large enterprises. The pace of change on these things isn't high, so even if the costs go up it takes a long time for people to migrate off the platform.

WhiteSource1 10y ago

Looks like lots of trouble in the whole ERP space. SAP isn't seeing people moving to HANA. Panaya is struggling. And Oracle EBS market share is declining.

orly_bookz 10y ago
I don't know if all ERP software is like what I've seen but what I've seen is a hot mess. If your company is ever looking to move to the ERP space from a homegrown legacy system like we did, don't buy Infor. I'd rather deal with greenscreens for the next twenty years of my life than have to deal with Infor products and support for one more year. And I used to hate old, tired Big Iron.
- WhiteSource1 10y ago
  Don't know anything about Infor but these are huge complex systems that people don't want to change because there is a huge risk of changes. So now they are falling behind, running up huge amounts of technical debt, and staying on old systems. I know with SAP most people have never heard of HANA and most of the companies that migrated did so because they were on very very old versions. Oracle EBS is pushing this migration to the cloud that is making a bit of traction with SMBs but not going anywhere in the enterprise and changes are difficult.

SQL2219 10y ago

https://www.indeed.com/jobtrends/q-Solaris.html https://www.indeed.com/jobtrends/q-Solaris.html

Annatar 10y ago
They are all dismally small, including Linux at ~1.4%: https://www.indeed.com/jobtrends/q-docker-q-kubernetes-q-smartos-q-solaris-q-linux-q-ubuntu-q-delphix.html https://www.indeed.com/jobtrends/q-docker-q-kubernetes-q-sma...

SQL2219 10y ago

https://www.indeed.com/jobtrends/q-oracle.html https://www.indeed.com/jobtrends/q-oracle.html