What do you expect ? Every major IT firm has gone through the transition from being a software product company to being a software service company. It's not a zero sum change.
IBM went through it, Microsoft went through it - and now you're seeing the impact of Oracle going through it.
If you've been sitting in your job for the last X years, doing the same thing every year - and not paying attention to the cloud revolution happening outside - then you've allowed yourself to become obsolete. Blame Oracle, blame your manager - sure... but you also need to keep a little bit of the blame for yourself.
The time of shipped boxed software that customers run on prem is fading. When you shipped version X.0, released a patch for X.1 through X.N - you needed a customer support team that was able to support the customer who installed X.0 and never upgraded - AND was able to support customers running X.N ...
When you serve software via an API - you support the latest version of that API. Nothing else. One of the fundamentals on which your support staffing structure was based - has changed.
If you work at Oracle in a technical role - and you've never tried to setup an AWS or Azure or GCP instance - then you've let the industry move past you. It's a completely different world out here. You need to catchup.
In the 1990s, the computer was important - we (Sun, HP, IBM, Digital) built big hardware - made the computer highly redundant - we lived for uptime. (Ahhh.. VMS... ) The computers became really really important so we built temples around them to provide for their every cooling and power needs.
In the 2000s, the network was important - Cisco built big hardware to make it highly available ... Sun declared the network was the computer... Most people started to realize the the internet existed.
Today - we finally realized that neither the network nor the computer are important.. Instead we realized that the DATA is important.
The cloud exists because we've become capable of managing multiple copies of the data - we no longer have to put it in a single box in the datacenter.. We can clone the data - chop the data, dice the data.. store the data... We spin up and throw away computers on a whim...
Oracle is changing into a cloud company ... It might succeed, it might fail... but one thing is surely true - and that is it needs to change to survive.
It s---s to be on the receiving end of a layoff - but this industry is not short of job openings...