UPDATED 01:38 EDT / MAY 04 2017

CLOUD

Report: Oracle set for big sales restructuring to focus on the cloud

Oracle Corp. is reportedly undergoing a major restructuring of its sales teams that could result in a number of layoffs at the end of the month.

The software giant has provided no official confirmation of the reports, let alone offered a comment, but The Register cites unidentified sources close to the company as saying the reorganization is Oracle’s “biggest for a decade” and comes as it strenuously chases more cloud business.

The reshuffle will mean that each Oracle customer will be serviced by a single account manager, rather than multiple managers for each product as happens now. As of June 1, the Register said, there will be one account manager for each of Oracle’s main products – database, middleware, business intelligence and hardware.

The Register’s story appears to be partly based on information from this anonymous forum post, which states that “Oracle is no longer an Apps company, Database Company or middle-ware company. Oracle is now a next gen cloud company and everyone in sales who is not cloud savvy will no longer have a job.”

As such, an unknown number of sales staff are set to be axed by the company, to be replaced by sales people with more knowledge of the cloud. The Register said one unnamed report indicates Oracle could cut as many as two-thirds of its sales staff.

As part of the reshuffle, Oracle is said to be recruiting new sales staff from its rivals. The Register said it’s keen to hire both sales and engineering support staff from Amazon Web Services, Google Cloud Platform and Microsoft Azure, among others. The site said the new recruits are being offered big salaries to jump ship, in the region of $87,000 to $130,938 a year. It’s not clear if this recruitment drive is linked to a number of job postings by Oracle that appeared online last week.

The reorganization will also see mid-sized customer accounts relating to Oracle’s on-premises products handed off to its Oracle Digital business, which was previously known as Oracle Direct. The Register said Oracle’s mid-sized customers refers to the 100 to 150 largest customer accounts outside its top 35. Those top 35 accounts will not be affected, though the reorganization could see that number swell to include more customers.

The move is likely motivated by Oracle’s ongoing transformation to a cloud-based business, said longtime analyst Dave Vellante, co-founder of Wikibon and SiliconANGLE Media. He said that Oracle was responding to the restructuring of the information technology business by “shifting toward a model with fewer stovepipes.”

Oracle, like many technology companies, is seeing rapid growth in its cloud business while simultaneously experiencing a slow, steady decline in its traditional on-premises businesses. In its third-fiscal quarter earnings report, Oracle said cloud accounts for 13 percent of its revenues, representing a 62 percent year-over-year increase. On-premises software remains Oracle’s biggest earner with 67 percent of its revenues, but it declined 3 percent from a year ago.

Oracle declined to comment on the reports.

Image: Raghu Peethambaran/Flickr

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