Is the parking lot at the former, massive Tekelec headquarters in Morrisville a lot more vacant these days?

Oracle is continuing to cut jobs, but in a conference call about its latest earnings report Chair Larry Ellison and other execs skipped restructuring while Ellison trashed Amazon.

The tech giant saw its shares rise 6 percent in after-hours trading thanks to a financial update that showed a 2 percent increase in revenue year-over-year to $9.2 billion. While revenue was slightly under Wall Street expectations, earnings per share beat the Street at 69 cents, 7 cents higher than forecast. Oracle also boosted its dividend.

Not mentioned in the conference call, however, was $161 million in restructuring costs and a drop in headcount of 779, notes The Street’s Eric Jhonsa.

As WRAL TechWire reported last week, Oracle has been laying off Triangle employees, according to sources. Oracle declined any comment.

Oracle spent an estimated $1 billion in buying Triangle-based Tekelec in 2013.

Let’s also not forget that Oracle bought NetSuite last year. NetSuite had a major op center in Durham where it had acquired Bronto Software.

Mum’s the word

There’s also no layoff notice that has been filed with the state of North Carolina. But such notices are not guaranteed. IBM has cut jobs for years and managed to avoid filing such reports.

TheLayoff.com, a website that reports on job cuts, has a much higher figure for Oracle layoffs, noting some 2,900 job cuts this year after Oracle began layoffs late in 2016 as part of a restructuring that reportedly has had a big impact on hardware units.

However, in the conference call, none of the analysts raised questions about job cuts or restructuring. Ellison and the other execs thus were able to hype Oracle’s performance. And Ellison wasted no time in trashing Amazon Web Services, a big rival in the cloud business which is essential to Oracle’s future.

Ellison vs AWS

Samples from Ellison, according to a transcript of the call provided by business news site Seeking Alpha::

  • “Let’s say, generation two of Oracle’s infrastructure as service cloud now has the ability to run customers’ largest databases, something that is impossible to do using Amazon web services. Amazon can only run relatively small Oracle databases in their cloud.”
  • “Many Oracle workloads now run ten times faster in the Oracle cloud versus the Amazon cloud. It also costs less to run Oracle workloads in the Oracle cloud than the Amazon cloud.”
  • “Well, we have a very, very large database business. We have hundreds of thousands of database customers and we have millions and millions of applications that run on the Oracle database. Most of those databases and most of those customers will move most of their databases and most of these workloads to the cloud. And we think our cloud will be – right now we have a huge technology lead over both Amazon and Azure with our new Generation 2 infrastructure as a service. We can deliver ultrahigh performance.”

Yet is Ellison really on target?

“Larry Ellison’s trash talk notwithstanding, Amazon Web Services (AWS), which saw its revenue rise 47% to $3.5 billion in the fourth quarter and whose Aurora managed database has become a thorn in Oracle’s side, shouldn’t be quivering just yet,” wrote The Street’s Eric Jhonsa.

Meanwhile, if you are a former Tekelec worker who has lost a job, send an email to the Skinny (rsmith@wral.com). If Oracle won’t talk, perhaps some of you will.

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