The Austin, Texas-based company disclosed in an annual regulatory filing earlier this year that its total workforce decreased by roughly 21,000 employees from 2025, costing the company roughly $2.1 billion mostly through severance packages and contract terminations.
Those cuts affected 741 Seattle-area employees between August 2025 and March, which, coupled with this week’s layoffs, means 1,100 Oracle workers in Seattle have been let go since last summer.
In a quarterly regulatory filing, Oracle addressed its 2026 restructuring plan and said it took further action after the fiscal year ended on Aug. 31, costing an additional $700 million and causing this week’s layoffs.
Oracle did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
Ditching Oracle DB is relatively straightforward: just migrate to PostgreSQL. PG’s admin tools aren’t as idiot-proof, but the DB itself is just fine. I’ve led several projects to do just that, and they all went smoothly and gave good ROI.
Migrating off Oracle’s ERP, on the other hand, is a costly, risky pain in the ass, and there aren’t many other places to jump: SAP in some sectors, Microsoft’s joke of an ERP system in some others (generally SMB). That’s Ellison’s real cash cow.
My team has a sizeable Java codebase to maintain, we only use open-source Java tooling to keep it alive. But I don’t know anyone in the past decade who’d give serious thought to using Java for a greenfield implementation.
Then there’s their substandard cloud offering. Ewww.
Textbook oligopolist rent-seeking. You can feed off the rotting corpse of your products for a very long time if you follow that strategy. Look at Adobe or Salesforce. Lock 'em in, then bleed 'em dry.