Its been a sweet ride as a sales engineer, sales consultant, or enterprise cloud architect at Oracle. Lately a post is on about the end of the enterprise sales consulting org. Its not a new rumor. We are just seeing a plan put in action.
@Uri1Gce details the GVP level being pushed out and shut down.
With his key folks like BS, AL leaving, RL and LW being pushed out, what happens to the ECA group? I have been approached about taking a hub position since it will be sure to be there. No matter how they sugarcoat it, it is still a demotion. I will be peers with class-of folks if I take this move. The other options are to wait out for the ax to drop and collect, or leave on my own. The SC organization was such a great job. We actualy did cool stuff and helped customers with hands on work. Moving to ECA and becoming a power point jockey has put the ECA's in a tough position to move.
9 Months ago we were told this would happen with the following post @Q4mq7hg
FY19 Oracle Zero (Not Coke Zero) is coming
A Group Vice President for Enterprise Cloud Architecture just got out of a meeting with HD who was proudly touting his plan for zero field Sales Consultants (Sales Engineers) in FY19. You heard that right. Everything is going to the hub in FY19.
New ECA training requires the field SCs to submit videos and use cases of their expertise in solving cloud problems at customer sites. This will be incorporated into the scripts handed out to the hubs in OD. Everything you know will be boiled down into slide decks and scripts. Turn over in OD is expected, this is handled by a well oiled process (with slides, scripts and point and click cloud demos) to on-board new hires and get them dialing for dollars in short order.
Those who got a severance package are the lucky ones. Its all been paid out. The rest get to suffer a pay cut and move to a hub. The track record of the typical ECA is not great. A once proud core tech who knew relational database, exadata and cloud. Was reduced to a power point and spread sheet jockey with no way to do a real database cloud demo. Forced to technical tap dance around missing features and exploding demos on the EMEA environment the typical ECA did not do well.
When asked how quickly a customer could get on the Exadata cloud if the customer signed a contract, it was a moment of truth. The ECA knowing that an Exadata would have to be built and drop shipped to a rented data center to be networked was looking at a 6 week window. How do you tell the customer? Do you lie, "sign the contract and you can start." and then make excuses for 6 weeks. Or do you tell the truth and get laughed at?
But now it was more than just database, the ECA had to know everything about all products. Products that were cobbled together by hand written IPaaS (integration platform as a service) It doesn't work, networking blows...
Maybe just maybe you could squeak out a bare metal backup service, or something. Or just tag yourself with an Oracle app sell that went through. The on prem stuff went to OD. Now everything is OD.
The wheels have come off, the spokes are gone and now the Oracle buss will roll around on the hubs. Packed to the gills with fresh naive college grads dialing for dollars. One thing is for sure. Your over paid salary will go to good use. The cost of goods sold is about to plummet. Your salary be directly applied to line the pockets of the executives that made it happen.
Yes HD is on the way out. No surprise here. He was just the guy who climbed the ladder by accepting responsibility as qualified people hit the eject button. He took on all the responsibility. Competence not required, success not required. Just accept the orders as you fly kamikaze style into oblivion.
The genius plan of one mans vision will reach fruition this year. MH has realized his vision for Oracle. Your time is up. The market is still good. The choice before you is one of abject humiliation as you sell your home, relocate (unpaid) and take up your desk next to a college grad while you dial for dollars, or jump ship and grab a job before the economy collapses inward into and inky black hole.
MH will look like a genius, he has packaged Oracle for sale. He has done his job as Oracle is now on the way to being an irrelevant legacy technology.
https://www.datamation.com/columns/article.php/3902836/Why-Mark-Hurd-is-a-Bad-Match-for-Oracle.htm
Why Mark Hurd is a Bad Match for Oracle
Hurd’s skill set, which trades off the strategic for the tactical, would have been great at Sun while it was being packaged for sale to Oracle. But it will likely be unsuccessful in the recovery stage it now finds itself in. Key employees will not want to stay with Oracle if they believe that Hurd will mostly cut their benefits, entitlements, and shift their jobs to lower cost locations without them. Attracting qualified employees will even be more difficult and the ones they do get are will likely be in “any port in a storm” mode and unlikely to be particularly loyal.
This is a bad match of skills and one you would think Larry Ellison would know to avoid.
Unless this was the plan all along....