Don Johson’s Email on lay-offs

Team,

I wanted to share with you context for the organizational restructuring happening today.

Over the past several years we've seen progressive change as Oracle has evolved into a cloud services company at its core. This is a giant shift across the company, often with our organization at its epicenter. It has affected the entire business broadly and pervasively – driving reorganizations, realigning investments, changing how we build and operate services, and evolving how we engage with our customers.

At last year’s Oracle Open World, Larry was clear about the vision and direction of the company: We're an enterprise cloud company supporting the most demanding customers and the most challenging workloads. We're organized around two centers of gravity: Apps and Infrastructure. As the foundation of our cloud business, OCI – Oracle's Gen 2 Cloud – provides our customers with a secure, reliable infrastructure platform that supports the primary pillars of our business, Autonomous Database and SaaS ERP.

Everything in the company is aligning around this clear vision and direction.

Today’s changes within OCI will better align with Larry's vision of the business. It will streamline our products and services, focus investments on our most strategic priorities, and help us to more effectively and rapidly deliver the full promise and reach of Oracle's Gen 2 Cloud.

Please join the OCI Leadership and me in an All Hands tomorrow, March 22nd, at 10:00 AM PDT to get more information about what this means for our team and the business.

OCI’s business is stronger than ever, and this team’s future is bright. I want to thank you all for your continued support as we double down on our strategic imperatives. We'll be building regions, continuing to hire and invest in strategic areas, and growing the business and our customers at a rapid pace.

--Don

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23 replies (most recent on top)

If LE is telling analysts flat revenues that actually means that revenues will crater - he’s just trying to lead them there step by step, slow boiling the frog, so the share price doesn’t crash. So watch out everybody - oracle revenues and share price are both about to CRASH!!!!!!!!

I watched that [email protected] meeting video. LE started talking about "managing to flat" meaning flat revenues for an UNKNOWN to him number of quarters during customer switch to cloud.

Hah.

They are prob more worried about managing to flat stock price to hold it +/- $2-$3 with buybacks. If they cannot or run out of cash they need layoffs and selloffs.

Makes one wonder if O will try to sell off legacy businesses to raise cash for buy backs.

New link to LE Bloomberg interview on deemphasizing businesses they don't care about is taken down now.

100K views - LOL

10K views -- put your glasses on

LE riff now at https://youtu.be/brVJLKWuOiY

Bloomberg put it back up

Hey now we know O reads this forum lolol

100K views - LOL

https://youtu.be/TXD3Xzk9Lmw

Listen LE riff about "deemphasizing businesses we don't care about" around 3:20 on in analyst call video. It is not some coup. It is all LE vision thing.

All I see in that email is a bunch of BS. Except for the part "...as we double down on our strategic imperatives...." Good luck to those of you still left, you are gonna need it. You might want to spend the weekend with family and friends while you can since you will be expected to burn the candle at both ends with no compensation or thanks, other than a generic email. Some things never change.

Wow

Agree with the comment. Stop selling OCC is stupid .. even though migrating the control plane from OCI-C to OCC takes time but still ahead in the market at the on demand service part.

OCI aka Cloud 2.0 could be good wrt security and for customers with extensive privacy requirements. Giving up on own O cloud and building apps to run on AWS, Google, etc. as reportedly TK wanted would have been a smaller but viable Oracle.

This strategy, to BE a cloud company with built in security features (and maybe the only cloud Autonomous Database will run on) is risky. So risky.

Why? Does the f'n OCI work now? Where...rented centers? How quickly could a new big customer get it's database live in "5 minutes" like LE bragged...but after months of paying and waiting for O to rent space, buy metal? Is there really a working Cloud2.0? Can it support thousands of customers? Or just the small toy customers like the "university researchers"?

I used to like Oracle, believe it is not. I grieved over the disillusionment. But people are going to ask questions.

We killed our leading product and predict that the gen2 will be better. Why customer trust this story?

Why oracle cloud is No.... where are we now?

OCC is interesting because that's probably the only product where we're actually ahead of the market.. dedicated public cloud stack inside your datacentre. Azure Stack was immature and Amazon Outpost was only an announcement.

Killing OCC gives them time to catch up, so if we do enter the market again with a "Gen 2" product it will be too late. We gave up that head start and will be irrelevant.

OCI-C isn't making tons of money for long. We don't sell it anymore. New customers can only go to OCI, and existing customers will be moved to OCI.

That's also why we stopped selling OCC. It was OCI-C in a box.

One thing he might wrong that Oracle is not a tech company, if those investment cannot make more money back, he would know one day will be just like today and even worse. Because OCI-C and AK are still making tons of money.

F--- him

@Ybg79FO-smb

Well said. This is a company that has no vision whatsoever.

"Everything in the company is aligning around this clear vision and direction." So we are a cloud company. When is this cloud company going to stop producing on-premise software?

ok, so Apps and Infrastructure includes what exactly? That's about as clear as b---s--- spewing out of this email.

Does it mean no more investment in Java and Java developer tools - incl Cloud based? That's not Apps or Infra, that's Platform. No Blockchain? Axing all of on-premise FMW including Weblogic and everything that runs on it?

DB is neither Apps nor Infrastructure - its Platform, unless Oracle is changing the definitions of cloud service models.

Could someone in a leadership position clearly state what stays, what goes, and decide what the hell we are doing because this is getting ridiculous.

Clearly, Autonomous DB is the golden child. OCI is the Cloud IaaS winner for the moment but they better prove themselves in short order because they are expensive which translates into an expensive service. Also, who thinks of Oracle as a company to buy cloud infrastructure from?

Apps, why are we so focused on the c-appy Apps we have? Peoplesoft is probably a leading app that people actually use (I've said that before) but I'm not sure how much that's in the cloud. Do we really have a SaaS offering that anyone really wants?

this has absolutely nothing (repeat nothing) at all to do with Oracle returning to its database roots. Those days are over, finished, caput and are never going to come back. This is about OCI and database happens to be a component of the OCI offerings along with dozens of others.

Bla bla bla... So, building an IaaS platforms as what MS & Amazon already have is the way going forward?

"We're organized around two centers of gravity: Apps and Infrastructure".

1) Apps was never successful. Even our internal implementation s---s as hell!

2) IaaS is a pure me2 story and customers don't want Oracle in this space. They're even not interested we have IaaS

I don't see the "center of gravity". But also the Titanic didn't see the iceberg...

What a joke. It's obvious that Oracle is cutting back on investment on everything and getting back to its database roots. Time is a flat circle.

this is just within OCI not whole Oracle

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Don Johson’s Email on lay-offs

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