A national layoff of 2,000 workers announced Thursday by Oracle Corp. is expected to hit the software company’s Denver office.
Andrew Albarelle, principal executive officer at Denver- based staffing firm Remy Corp., said local laid-off Oracle employees have contacted his firm looking for jobs.
“They’ve laid off (people in) technical resource, business analysis and project managers,” he said.
No one from Oracle was available to comment on the size of the Denver-area job cuts, which come a week after Oracle completed its $5.8 billion acquisition of Siebel Systems Inc.
But Oracle spokesman Bob Wynne said notifications of the layoffs already have begun and that the majority will be completed over the next few weeks.
On the Oracle campus at the Denver Tech Center on Thursday night, a woman carried boxes from an office to a convertible parked near the front door.
The woman, who wouldn’t give her name, said she had been laid off and she knew other people who also lost their jobs.
Oracle employs about 1,400 workers at offices in the Denver Tech Center and in Colorado Springs. The company laid off 600 people in Colorado last year after Oracle acquired PeopleSoft for $10.3 billion. PeopleSoft employed 2,000 workers in metro Denver after acquiring Denver-based software company J.D. Edwards in 2003.
Oracle, the world’s third-largest software maker, will have 55,000 employees after the cuts, chief financial officer Safra A. Catz said in a conference call.
Catz said the layoffs will be felt across the combined company, with less than half of the cuts coming from former Siebel workers.
Oracle plans to retain more than 90 percent of Siebel’s product-development, support and sales teams.
Chief executive Larry Ellison spent more than $18 billion in the last year buying companies, including Siebel, to bolster profit.
The company completed its takeover of Siebel on Jan. 31, after Siebel investors voted to accept $10.66 a share in cash or Oracle stock.
Ellison is counting on acquisitions, including the $10.6 billion buyout of PeopleSoft Inc. in January 2005, to expand sales of business programs and challenge market leader SAP AG.
The PeopleSoft deal vaulted Oracle to No. 2 in the $24.3 billion business-management software market behind Walldorf, Germany-based SAP, according to AMR Research Inc. in Boston.
Business-management applications for tasks such as customer service, payroll and human resources accounted for 25 percent of new software license orders at Oracle.
Ellison, 61, wants the businesses to lessen dependence on Oracle’s database program.
“We’re in a slower-growth environment and as Larry (Ellison) said, if you can get 10 percent growth from organic growth and 10 percent from acquisition, it adds cash and adds earnings,” Chuck Jones who helps manage $16 billion including Oracle shares at Atlantic Trust Stein Roe in San Francisco, said in an interview before Thursday’s news.
Redwood City, Calif.,-based Oracle shares fell as low as $12.57 after the announcement, but closed at $12.69. The shares fell 11 percent last year on concern that Ellison is making acquisitions too quickly.
Profit in the current fiscal year is expected to be 60 cents to 62 cents a share, Oracle said Thursday in a statement. Oracle earlier forecast profit of 78 cents to 81 cents on sales of $14.2 billion to $14.4 billion for the year ending May 31.
Oracle sold $5.75 billion in debt last month, the biggest corporate bond sale in almost two years, to fund the Siebel purchase. The company hadn’t sold bonds since 1997, and the sale increases Oracle’s long-term debt from $150 million as of Nov. 30.
Denver Post staff writers Kimberly S. Johnson and Beth Potter and Denver Post wire services contributed to this report.
