Oracle's 'widespread' layoff aired on LinkedIn

Oracle Corp. began laying off employees Monday, something more than two dozen employees indicated on posts to their LinkedIn profiles.

Several described the Oracle layoffs on LinkedIn as "widespread," although the company has not announced the size of the workforce reduction and the layoffs seem targeted to specific business areas. Some had been employees of the company for more than a decade and others for just a few months, one saying his start date was May 31.

Oracle, which is based on Austin, Texas, had not responded to a request for comment by late in the day. That left it to others, such as LinkedIn, to aggregate some of the postings by affected employees.

Many of the affected Oracle employees who posted on their LinkedIn profiles wrote heartfelt messages. They expressed not only thanks to their colleagues and what they learned, but also how a layoff does not define their worth.

Oracle's marketing-related side of its business, including customer experience, was cited by LinkedIn posters as an area that saw cuts. One poster called it a "shift in strategy," something R "Ray" Wang, founder and principal analyst at Constellation Research, agreed was underlying the layoff.

Wang said the firm is "focusing more on sales and services."

Oracle employs about 133,000 globally, and there have been rumors in recent weeks of significant layoffs.

The company has also made other strategic moves, including its recent acquisition of health information technology firm Cerner Corp., for $28 billion. One of Oracle's goals is to tackle the fragmentation problem in health records.

For its 2022 fiscal year, which ended May 31, Oracle reported a total revenue increase of 5%, to $42.4 billion.

Patrick Thibodeau covers HCM and ERP technologies for TechTarget. He's worked for more than two decades as an enterprise IT reporter.