Oracle to layoff more Sun staff

Oracle will lay off more Sun Microsystems workers, according to a regulatory filing it made on Friday in the United States.

According to reports, this will mostly affect its Asian and European workforces. Oracle indicated the job cuts by way of severance packages in the Securities and Exchange (SEC) filing, which will amount to a figure between US$675 million and US$825 million.

Last October, Sun signalled its intention to cut up to 10 per cent of its workforce, or around 3000 workers, in preparation for Oracle's takeover of the company. The move was estimated to cost US$325 million. Oracle chief executive officer Larry Ellison had said at the time that Sun was losing US$100 million a month while Oracle awaited approval from European regulators for its acquisition of Sun.

Oracle declined to provide further detail to ZDNet Asia on the extent of the latest cuts to the region.

Ellison in January disputed reports of layoffs in the company, saying instead it was planning to hire some 2000 staff over the coming months to beef up the Sun acquisition.

Sun has an estimated 30,000-strong workforce globally.

Phil Hassey, vice president of services research at Springboard Research, said in an email interview with ZDNet Asia that the job cuts were "not that much of a surprise", and were likely part of the ongoing trimming that Oracle has had to do around its acquisition of Sun.

The job cuts may not bring short-term profitability back to Sun, Hassey noted.

Oracle will have to focus on portions of Sun's business that enterprises were willing to pay for, as well as work on go-to-market strategies, in order to bring Sun to profitability, he said.

Oracle first announced the Sun buy in April 2009, and won approval from the US Department of Justice in August.

However, the European Commission objected to the deal in November last year, attributing it to worries over whether the open-source interests of Sun's MySQL database would be compromised by the new owner, which produces a proprietary database product.

The European Commission eventually gave its approval in January.

The Australian Competition and Consumer Commission also looked into the acquisition and decided not to oppose it.

Via ZDNet Asia