Thread regarding Oracle Corp. layoffs

@1eov: I wish I could tell you, but it would be obvious who I was to others who I know visit this page.

@1auy

Good for you! What region and capacity are with oracle? Long time employee? Glad to hear the market is hiring some.

@1bby: I have three job offers lined up, I've been to two interviews. If they asked for volunteers, I'd gladly step forward and get the package. There's just one problem. I already tried quitting recently and got a counter offer that I accepted, no strings attached, I don't have to stay, the only advantage is that my potential severance package grew larger.

@1mby

I like the gullible ones like you that drink the kool aid!!

You guys get blindsided the most and I will laugh as I see you headed to the unemployment line.

@1mby- Thank you for taking the time to response. I hope that Oracle management sees what's going on and do something about it. Employees are nervous...if Sales don't pick up, we'll have nothing to support. I see first hand that customers are migrating to AWS, open-source software and HPE and Dell hardware. Yes, engineered systems are selling very well!

F17Q3 capital canceled for STK and Solaris yesterday.

@btk: Yet another one who has everything figured out.

@prf: Bullsh--. If someone approves a strategy and plans for x quarters or years ahead, it's going to go on until there's time for a strategy review. Nobody will bankroll a huge undertaking only to decide to screw it after two quarters.

@oxw: The only place where funding is not secured are small companies. Large ones either have the money at hand or will issue bonds or stock to cover the cost of large projects.

Here's another strategy I just made up: Fire everyone, drop costs to zero!

"Wall Street" this, "Wall Street" that. Look up Oracle's ownership structure. Biggest single shareholder is LE, with >27% ownership. Biggest group of shareholders are institutional holders which are interested in long term profitability and potential dividend. None of them are interested in hitting quarterly goals, only that the company itself is profitable.

If the market is not interested at all, suppose literally zero systems were sold since June, then indeed, everything will be halted, sunk costs be damned.

But I have two questions:

• If it's good and it's selling, why would it be canceled?

• And if it's so bad that Oracle cannot generate any interest in it, then why cry over it or the people associated with it?

@-lrt

No such thing as funding secured! In any industry. Have you been around very long?

It's all about ROI. Wall Street may not wait 5 quarters for a strategy to start working. They will scrap a plan if necessary to bring costs in line. All they have to do is ride off the losses of dev costs.

Another Oracle PR troll. There will be layoffs.

People don't realize how expensive it is to design CPUs and how long the process takes. Even with Sonoma which is essentially (in a very simplistic manner) a stripped down M7, it still takes several months to bring it to market. Even if S7 was literally a fused off (and/or binned) M7, they still have to order, test, assemble and market whole systems, which would take at least six months.

Oracle barely launched Sonoma half a year ago, and it was already FY17, so funding is already secured for this year.

It would be literally impossible to recover development and marketing costs since the launch. It's in for long haul.

The earliest that Oracle can even consider assessing if it's worthwhile to keep up Sonoma's development is next fiscal year. And even then the only way they can assess if it was a success would be conjecture by comparing Sonoma's sales to low-cost IBM POWER servers and how they fared compared to the Unix server market in general and to the whole server landscape in general. If Oracle is able to get market share in a shrinking market, that's still a huge success which undermines IBM and that might be more important to its long term viability than pure profits.

The only two things I conceivably see happening are:

• Oracle rolls SPARC M and S lines together and sells them as one CPU in a various set of systems where you choose and pay for the features you need and intend to use. If your needs change, you pay for a license to use more. For instance, the CPU might come with two 10Gbit Ethernet, two Infiniband fabrics, four memory channels and sixteen cores on die and you can choose to get the CPU in a system which sports all these connectors, but you only opt for one on-CPU Ethernet port, two memory channels and four cores. Once your needs grow, you enable the extra features. If Sonoma is indeed a fused off SPARC M and sales justify keeping the line, but savings don't justify making separate Sonoma dies, then it's a possibility.

• Oracle rolls all SPARC lines together. I don't see it happening. SPARC T is simply too specialized and making one huge CPU covering all the markets makes no sense even if they're manufactured on TSMC 16 nm high density node.