Oracle Dumps PeopleSoft Employees

curtain writes "The first move in Oracle's dismantling of PeopleSoft has begun. The cuts will affect about 9% of the 55,000 staff of the combined companies. From the article: "We're mourning the passing of a great company," Peoplesoft worker David Ogden as saying. Other employees said they would rather be sacked than work for Oracle."

Comments

Re:Larry may be good at business but...

[QuasEye]

That reminds me of an old joke - "What's the difference between God and Larry Ellison?" "God doesn't think he's Larry Ellison."

Welcome to Corporate America

[Anonymous Coward]

1. Corporations are not a democracy.
2. Corporations do best for the shareholders.
3. The majority shareholders are mostly a small group of already wealthy people.
4. Aquire companies with "leveraged synergies".
5. Fire redundant pawns. Feed jobs overseas.
6. Lower competition.
7. Handfull of shareholders get even richer at the expense of thousands of families and the business es they patronize.
8. Most people and the local economy lose.

Welcome to the American Way. /waits for the revolution

Re:Starting back in 2002... this was inevitable

[Flamefly]

The fact is, that the two companies merged. With any successful merger the outcome is that overall costs are cut, otherwise what is the point?

When two similar companies merge you obviously get overlap, and this is where the initial savings can be made, there is zero point to keeping two teams of support staff (be it in IT, HR, Marketing etc) when there is only enough work to justify the single team.

How really else can you expect it to work? Would you honestly invest in a company as a shareholder if that company had 5000+ people employeed who essentially had no job to do, just twiddling their thumbs?

Any merger that *doesn't* cut jobs, surely at least, partially a failure. You may not embrace capitalism wholeheartedly, but look around you, it's not too bad.

To clear up some misperceptions

[afabbro]

There seem to be a few misperceptions here about what's happening.

IT people are not being laid off. Back-office people are being laid off. When you merge two companies, you wind up with two payroll departments, two HR departments, two legal departments, two accounting departments, etc.

Fifty years ago, you mostly kept everyone because everything was done manually. Today, if you have a (computerized) payroll system that can handle 40,000 employees, it can probably handle 55,000. If it can't, you generally add more hardware/IT resources, not more people. The same thing is largely true about most back-office jobs.

So, what do you do with thousands of redundant people? It's not realistic to think that you can retrain them all, or that they all want to be retrained ("hey, mister SPHR-certified HR specialist with 20 years' experience, here's a book on Java!")

The people who usually survive mergers are (a) people in the acquiring company, (b) people in the acquired company who are responsible for making/developing the product, and (c) good salespeople in the acquired company. That is certainly the pattern here.

I'm not saying that Oracle/Ellison is some lilly-white invisible-glad-hand or that the Oracle-Peoplesoft merger is a good thing...just saying that is the way it works in business and this wasn't really any surprise. This notion that "Wall Street loves job cuts" or "corporate America is so short-sighted" etc. doesn't survive that "well, what would you suggest instead?" test.

Re:Starting back in 2002... this was inevitable

[jafac]

he fact is, that the two companies merged. With any successful merger the outcome is that overall costs are cut, otherwise what is the point?


Eliminate competition.

A point that most "lazzez faire capitalists" seem to miss.

A *SUCCESSFUL* merger is a purchase of a "good" company, with skilled employees. Such employees can adapt to the new corporate structure, via the guidance of competent management, to remain productive, and not redundant.
Unfortunately, such companies are difficult to find, and they are not convenient merger targets, because, more likely than not, they're already doing well on their own thankyouverymuch. Layoffs after such mergers, are usually kept to a minimum.

A *TAKEOVER* merger, is a purchase of another company, and dismantling of it's resources, purely to deprive the market of competition. It costs the buyer a lot of money up front, because they're usually buying an essentially worthless peice of junk, in order to euthanize it. Or, in cases where they're buying a company that's not totally worthless, it soon will be. The only benefit to the purchaser is the destruction of a competitor.