While this site focuses on layoffs and there is plenty to talk about within Oracle right now, take a step back for a second to ponder what your own best path forward will be.
In some ways, what is happening with Cloud is similar to what happened in US electronics manufacturing in the 90's and early 2000's. Contract manufacturing offered the ability for corporations to focus on core competencies like product design while the sheer scale and global footprint of the contract manufacturers reached a point where costs went down and quality went up. Those who moved quickly, like Foxconn and Flextronics, ended up with the largest market share. The vast majority of US companies shed their own manufacturing staff with the exception of partner managers, manufacturing liasons, etc. While Foxconn and Flextronics ended up at the top of the heap, there are other contract manufacturers that survived although at a smaller size and scale. The resulting aftermath of the shift to Cloud will likely have some similarities.
It is early in the Cloud era, but the impact is starting to be seen. Some areas are losing value while others are just starting to grow. While this forum is about Oracle, look at other threads to get an overview at the broader impact of the shift to Cloud -- IBM and Microsoft would be good starting points. By seeing that on-premises deployments are slowing, that cost competitiveness is key and that future interest is in agility/Cloud, one can begin to figure out a career path that will work.
What follows is just my perspective as I look at the overall landscape and how it will end up impacting Oracle. Feel free to add your own insights.
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Demand for on-premises hardware is declining but won't necessarily go away altogether. Just look at the IBM mainframe after all these years -- it's a small market, but it is still alive. There is going to be much less of a need for those in hardware design and sales in Oracle, but also in other competitors. If you want to stay in this field, picking the right company along with the right department is going to be critical in order to stay employed. Or, potentially, consider looking at the "new" wave of hardware design being executed at global scale (e.g. Amazon, Microsoft and Google).
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Intel along with Windows and Linux have won the next generation computing battle. While Solaris still has some enthusiastic customers and had some amazingly reliable systems, that base is shrinking. It isn't going to require many people to support/sell that product (assuming Oracle decides to continue investing in it at all).
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On-premise and hybrid approaches will exist for some period of time. However, if you aren't tied to selling the new on-demand/consumption based models for hybrid Cloud, your time is limited. That means the current Oracle hardware teams who are primarily paid to just sell on-premise equipment and are largely cut out of the new model of hardware sales.
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Driving down cost isn't just a key part of Cloud, but also is doubly important to Oracle given that shareholders have come to expect a certain profit margin over the years. Oracle is now competing with Amazon who is thrilled to have higher margins than the retail business provides, but is content to accept lower margins than Oracle feels it needs to have. That leaves Oracle needing to cut internal costs just to try to avoid a major shareholder disappointment. Expect cost cutting, cautious investment and layoffs to continue.
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Overseas laborers and recent college graduates can expect opportunity at Oracle because they represent a way to lower costs. If you are in India where Oracle already has 40,000+ employees and growing or are a college graduate in Virginia, Texas or California, there will be spots that Oracle is looking to fill.
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Rumor has it that Oracle is already expecting high turnover in this new India/college graduate model as the top 20-30% will leave one they see that they could do better elsewhere and the bottom 20% will likely be trimmed annually. Oracle's future looks very much like a churn-and-burn type of environment.
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If you are an experienced worker with 10+ years in the industry, your salary and benefits are simply too high for what Oracle wants to pay. You'll need to have significant skill differentiation, be tied to the growth areas (Oracle Digital, Bare Metal Cloud, etc.) and/or be assigned to high value customers who regularly give significant revenue to Oracle to help justify your salary.
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Oracle's strengths are in its Apps, database and existing hardware (mainly Exadata) deployments. Customers who are tightly tied to any of those can't easily exit and are the most likely to be open to Oracle's Cloud efforts. If your customer falls into one of those buckets, you may have a future at Oracle for a while.
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Oracle is acting more like a hosting platform than a Cloud. Instead of building an elastic Cloud environment, they only invest what they have to and, on occasion, customers experience an inability to deploy after buying Oracle Cloud credits because there isn't enough capacity. Instead of building a Cloud where location doesn't matter, Oracle's Public Cloud accounts automatically are tied to a specific datacenter which makes scaling out difficult. Oracle's Cloud is primarily based on renting space (i.e. colocation) and they still haven't adequately interconnected the sites they do have. It all seems to come back to trying to save money instead of investing in order to compete. Oracle is, at best, a Tier 2 "Cloud" and that will be a limiting factor in terms of being able to sell to customers.
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Oracle is significantly behind Amazon, Microsoft and Salesforce in the Cloud race. Oracle's best shot at winning in any area is in SaaS and that is where most of the current Oracle Cloud revenue is currently coming from. Even so, Oracle is struggling to win against SaaS companies like Salesforce and Workday in the enterprise space, so look for an effort to grow the acquisition of Netsuite and the small to medium business market into a larger strategic effort.
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Oracle's primary products were all designed during the "scale up" age of the 80s-90s when the thought was that a consolidated, single environment was the best path. The model is now "scale out" and speed to deployment with agile development and a movement to VMs to containers to "serverless". That is at odds with Oracle's largely monolithic, extremely heavy and very costly software. Expect more loss of customers who can find ways to disentangle themselves from Oracle as alternative options are becoming increasingly available and viable.
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Oracle's past focus on building out a sales force that is siloed by product doesn't fit into the Cloud services world. That will need to be totally revamped at some point in time and it will likely be extremely painful both for Oracle, but also for many employees who will end up being let go. Being in SaaS or IaaS/PaaS roles will be the best bet for holding onto a job at Oracle.
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MH seems to believe that once a customer has moved to Oracle's Cloud that field personnel will be unnecessary as Oracle Digital can just sit back and take orders/renewals. Whether accurate or not, as long as MH is at the helm, expect for the field teams to be squeezed.
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Oracle has rubbed many enterprise customers the wrong way with overly aggressive licensing, auditing and legal policies coupled with poor (and expensive) support. There are some signs that Oracle is looking to new global markets (especially India) and pursuing smaller customers as a way to find new growth areas that can be serviced with low costs. This could show up in growing international investment and workforces while US-based revenue and employee count stays stagnant or declines.
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Cloud is just the start. With the consolidation of computing power and data, the ability to utilize all of that to train and leverage machine learning is the next big step forward. If Oracle can hold onto enough database and Apps customers, there could be some future and opportunity in this area. Otherwise, Oracle will fall further behind the Tier 1 Cloud providers.
Look at the trends for yourself and tend to your own future.