Reports indicate that Oracle Corporation (NYSE:ORCL) is laying off staff in its scalable processor architecture (SPARC) and Solaris operating system business. Both SPARC and Solaris operating system were originally products of Sun Microsystems before Oracle acquired the company in 2010 at a price of $7.4 billion. One of the first people to break the news of the layoffs was a former executive of Sun Microsystems, Simon Phipps.
“For those unaware, Oracle laid off all Solaris tech staff yesterday in a classic silent EOL [end of life] of the product,” Phipps wrote on Twitter.
Lay-off notices
In total around 2,500 employees are expected to lose their jobs. This includes in Oracle’s facilities located in Santa Clara, California; India; Burlington, Massachusetts; Broomfield, Colorado; Austin, Texas; and San Diego, California. Lay-off notices are believed to have been sent out last Friday before the Labor Day weekend started.
The lay-offs come just a few weeks after the systems executive vice president at Oracle, John Fowler, left the company. Fowler was in charge of storage tape products, networking, x86-based servers, Solaris and SPARC. This is leading to speculation that there will no further development of the Solaris OS. At the beginning of the year a new roadmap of products had been published by Oracle and there was no indication that Solaris 12 would be released. Instead updates to Solar would be referred to as ‘Solaris 11.next’. This was revealed in a blog posted by Glynn Foster the Solaris product manager.
Public cloud
Prior to Oracle’s acquisition of Sun Microsystems the enterprise software maker specialized in financial applications and databases and the business of SPARC microprocessors and computer servers was new. The acquisition came as a surprise to many and the then chief executive officer claimed that the server and the microprocessor business it had purchased would result in a software and hardware behemoth that would rival IBM at its peak. However, from the beginning the enterprise software maker struggled with server sales as it was coming at a time when public cloud data centers were taking off.
On Tuesday shares of Oracle Corporation rose by 0.61% to close the day at $50.93.
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