Oracle to cut 2000 Jobs

Oracle will lay off 2000 employees in the process of completing integration of its Siebel Systems acquisition. The deal which was completed on 31st of January is going to affect more Oracle staffers than those in the newly acquired company.

"The majority of the people being laid off are Oracle employees, not Siebel employees," said Oracle chief executive Larry Ellison in a conference call with investors. He added that most job cuts affected Oracle’s CRM development team.

Oracle will retain 90 percent of Siebel’s support and development engineers, sales representatives and technical sales consultants, according to the company’s CEO Larry Ellison. When the integration is complete, Oracle’s work force will total about 55,000.

“Over the last few months, Oracle and Siebel employees have been working together at the operational level to develop an extensive set of post-merger integration plans. These early efforts will enable us to fold in Siebel’s operations rapidly, with many of the big operational items completed in the next couple of weeks.”, said Safra Catz, Oracle’s co-president and chief financial officer.

Besides providing details about the reduction, Oracle also lowered its profit projections for the rest of its fiscal year. Excluding acquisition charges and other expenses unrelated to its continuing business, Oracle expects to earn 18 cents per share during the current quarter, a penny below the average estimate among analysts surveyed by Thomson Financial.

In the following quarter, Oracle expects to earn 26 cents per share, excluding certain expenses, also a penny below analyst estimates.

Oracle’s shares gained 12 cents to close at $12.69 on the Nasdaq Stock Market, then backtracked by 8 cents in extended trading.