Oracle axes 2,000 jobs

Oracle's Larry Ellison saves most Siebel employees

Oracle plans to lay off 2,000 employees as a result of its Siebel Systems acquisition.
The company completed the $5.85bn purchase of the CRM vendor on 31 January. But the subsequent layoffs have affected Oracle staff more 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 plans to use the Siebel software as the foundation for its next-generation Fusion suite scheduled for release by 2008. Fusion will replace all existing enterprise applications from Oracle, JD Edwards, PeopleSoft and Siebel.

"We had a very large CRM development organisation. As we move forward to Fusion and the next generation of CRM, we had more people than we needed to develop Fusion. A very large number of people are duplications in the development efforts on the CRM side," said Ellison.

Overall about 90 per cent of all Siebel employees are retained, the company said. Siebel will continue to have a dedicated salesforce and Oracle plans to keep selling its CRM software as a separate product.

The Siebel integration differs from those of JD Edwards and PeopleSoft when the acquired salesforces were merged.