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.