Tech giant Oracle has fired around 100 staff in India as part of its global restructuring strategy to ramp up its cloud offering. The development comes after two of its top executives Thomas Kurian and Amit Zavery joined Google. In recent times, tech companies are remaking themselves into shiny new cloud image and are laying off employees. Apparently, SAP has also laid off its employees. IBM has been undergoing rolling layoffs for years and HP had cuts tens of thousands of jobs in 2015.
According to The Times of India, software developers, quality assurance and documentation professionals have been badly impacted by the announcement. Some sources privy to the development said, "some employees were asked to come for the meeting with their laptops, an indication that they would be asked to surrender their laptop and sign off."
India is not the only place where Oracle is laying off people as in the United States, the company has let go of 500 people. Oracle spokesperson Deborah Hellinger said, "As our cloud business grows, we will continually balance our resources and restructure our development group to help ensure we have the right people delivering the best cloud products to our customers around the world."
Oracle considers India as its largest delivery centre outside the US. The company has a strong workforce of 38,000 people in the country. Although Oracle reported better-than-expected earnings last week, its revenue for the quarter of $9.61 billion was flat year-over-year. The company registered $40 billion in 2018 revenues and employs 1.4 lakh people globally. It has plans to deliver double-digit non-GAAP profits in terms of earnings per share.
In recent years, Oracle is shifting its focus towards cloud while minimising its exposure to hardware and software businesses to fight with players like Google and Microsoft. The Oracle Cloud offers a suite of integrated applications for a variety of requirements including sales, service, marketing, HR, finance, supply chain and manufacturing.