A few days ago I went on a rant about Oracle having layoffs and that some of my friends would probably be losing their jobs.
Well the rumor that Oracle Support in Orlando and Colorado Springs would be cutting employees is true.
Here’s the headcount so far based on my sources inside Oracle.
Oracle Layoff Tally
Fixed Assets, Orlando: 2
Accounts Receivable, Orlando: 1
Accounts Receivable, Colorado Springs: 1
Oracle Hosted Support, Orlando: 1
Additionally there are rumored to be 3 – 4 more gone from Inventory. General Ledger (GL) and Project Accounting have not been touched, yet. However, General Ledger is running 3 people down anyway so there was no room to cut from that department.
One of the people laid off today was a woman who lost her husband 2 years earlier and has been at Oracle over 5 years. I’m sure Oracle will site reasons like poor performance and chronicle illnesses but I’m sure age was a large factor as well. She was one of the oldest people in Oracle Financials Support. She was part of the Oracle Hosted Solutions (OHS) support team and was the “HUB”. Three of the employees laid off today were older in tenure and in age and were women ranging in age from their 40’s to late 50’s. Could tenure and age be factors Oracle used in determining who got the axe?
Word has it that OHS is getting hit hard because it’s a “big failure“. Inside sources cite the way OHS was structured as the reason it failed. Here’s how it works. Oracle hosts a customer’s financial application and database. Oracle maintains them and fully supports them via OHS support. The customer just uses the apps. This alleviates the need for a huge staff of IT for the Oracle’s customer.
OHS Support Process
- The customer logs their issue with the HUB.
- The HUB engineer logs an SR (service request) with the GRID (normal apps team).
- Internally the GRID works the issues with the HUB engineer.
- Then the HUB engineer logs another service request with the dba’s.
- There can be 4 – 5 other SR’s being worked via the hub so it requires a lot of coordination.
Prior to Oracle Support implementing the OHS system all OHS customers logged a ticket with the normal apps team and there was only one request per issue. With OHS there can be several requests per issue and obviously with more requests come more complication and customer satisfaction goes down the drain. Word has it that the translations support system is a big mess too because Oracle Support in Orlando got rid of the Latin American Division in an effort to cut costs.
This just goes to show you that the media is Oracle’s preferred method of bringing layoff news. Way to go Larry! You accomplished the impossible, you drove employee morale lower than your customer satisfaction levels.
Jason Dowdell is a technology entrepreneur and operates the Marketing Shift blog.
