Got my last check yesterday. There are a lot of good people still at Oracle, but there are far more that have left. Frankly, Oracle has been losing good people since Hurd was introduced into leadership in 2010.
The new model with OD driving sales remotely will not work and we all know it. Technical sales requires solving real tecnical problems with the customer. It requires much deeper involment than a webex and a phone call.
Migrating a customers on premises datacenter to the cloud is not something that can be done remotely either. It requires good technical talent working side by side with the customer building trust and respect, solving real world problems.
The competition gets this simple point. I am interviewing with AWS and they are happy to hire lots of people with enterprise sales experience.
The idea that Oracle is implementing is counter to everything I have learned about sales. There is so much more information gained from a face to face meeting. You can see experssions, the rolling of the eyes, who is engaged and who is not. You get additional information from idle chit chat, and serious intelligence from lunches and dinners with the customer.
The one thing you do not cut to increase revenue is the salesforce. I wish everyone at Oracle the best of luck. Honestly I don't see how Oracle can win. Google, AWS and Microsoft all invested over 9 billion in infrastructure for the cloud ladt year. At best Oracle invested 1.7 billion.
How can you beat the competition when you dont invest in infrastructure or an on site sales team, when your competition does?