Oracle begins to lay off employees as company aims for $1bn in cost cuts

Company reportedly planning more layoffs in Canada, Europe, and India

Database giant Oracle began laying off employees on Monday.

Some of the unknown number of cuts came from the company’s San Francisco-area offices, The Information reports.

The layoffs were in the company’s US customer experience division, according to Bloomberg, and impacted everyone from a junior sales employee to a division sales director.

Last year, executive vice president Douglas Kehring said the division had “historically been probably a little more disappointing than it should have been”.

The Independent has contacted Oracle for comment.

The company is aiming to reduce its costs by $1bn, according to an Information report from July.

“Today is a sad day at Oracle,” Chad Cain, a former senior manager in solution engineering at Oracle, wrote on LinkedIn on Monday. “They have decided to reorganize the CX organization and move on from several solutions. There will be many people impacted by this realignment and quality folks will be lost.”

It’s a period of change for Oracle and its estimated 143,000 employees, as the company deals with layoffs and departures, and anticipates two major new lines of business.

About 60 people were cut from the company’s advertising unit last month, and top executives including CMO Ariel Kelman and marketing leader Juergen Lindner are expected to leave the company.

More cuts could be coming in Canada, India, and Europe, according to The Information.

There have been positives as well.

Last month, Oracle won regulatory approval to buy medical records company Cerner for $28bn, and is set to absord its roughly 20,000 employees.

In June, it inked a deal to store US user data for the wildly popular social video-sharing service TikTok.

So far, in fiscal year 2022, the company has spent $191m in restructuring costs, mainly related to severance payments.

This summer, Oracle reported a 5 per cent revenue increase over the previous year, and $2.9bn in cloud revenues.