Kamal Ghorui
It’s been less than a week since Oracle announced thousands of layoffs across its offices worldwide. Oracle layoffs were notified to fired employees in an email at 6 a.m. on March 31. The email sent to thousands of employees informed them that Tuesday (March 31) would be their last day. “After careful consideration of Oracle’s current business needs, we have made the decision to eliminate your role as part of a broader organizational change,” said the email.Oracle has started the new week after layoffs with the appointment of a new chief financial officer (CFO). The software giant Oracle has appointed Hilary Maxson as chief financial officer. Maxson’s appointment as Oracle CFO is effective immediately. According to Oracle, Maxson has served as group CFO at Schneider Electric, an energy management and automation company with over $45 billion in annual revenue. The report says that Oracle has tapped an executive “with experience in infrastructure and energy to steer its efforts to meet surging demand for artificial intelligence and cloud services.” Doug Kehring, who served as Oracle’s Principal Financial Officer for the past six months, will step down following the new appointment and will return to focusing on the company’s go-to-market operations.The new CFO’s appointment comes as Oracle has been taking on a heavy debt load to fuel its massive AI infrastructure spending. Maxson said she aimed to ensure continued disciplined investment for creating lasting value for both customers and shareholders. Oracle is working on what analysts call “historic” build-out of data centers to power AI workloads for customers such as Sa, Altman’s OpenAI. The company, long known for its database software, has been making a transition the past few years to bulk up its cloud computing unit with a focus on AI, intending to become a viable competitor to market leaders Amazon and Microsoft.In a regulatory filing Oracle said, Maxson will receive an annual base salary of $950,000 and will be eligible for a performance-based bonus with a target of $2.5 million. A Cornell graduate with an MBA, Maxson has a decorated career in financial services, including stints at The AES Corporation, Citibank and Bank of America.
More Oracle layoffs ‘coming’
Last month (March), a report in Bloomberg warned about huge layoffs at Oracle. The report said that Oracle is planning to cut thousands of jobs, among its moves to handle a cash crunch from a massive AI data center expansion effort.“The job reductions will affect divisions across the company and may be implemented as soon as this month, according to people familiar with the matter who asked not to be named discussing the still-private plans. Some of the cuts will be aimed at job categories that the company expects it will need less of due to AI,” said the report. Some reports claim that the job cuts announced last week are not all, Oracle is likely to cut up to 30,000 jobs overall. Wall Street reportedly projects the expenditures by the cloud unit for data centers to push Oracle’s cash flow negative over the coming years before the spending begins to pay off in 2030, according to data compiled by Bloomberg. Last month, Oracle said it would raise as much as $50 billion this year through a combination of debt and equity sales.
