Layoffs at Oracle Corp.’s Denver office last week were done with surgical precision, a remaining employee said Friday.
Extra security personnel escorted people out of the building Thursday as soon as they were told they were losing their jobs, said the man, who declined to give his name, saying he didn’t want to lose his job.
“They hustled them out. In the computer business, you don’t want people sticking around where they can do damage,” the man said. “It was totally out of the blue. They were all in shock.”
He said about 150 to 200 people working mostly on software development lost their jobs at Oracle’s Denver Tech Center office. Oracle employs about 1,400 employees in Denver and Colorado Springs.
The layoffs were part of 2,000 job cuts nationwide announced Thursday by Oracle, a Redwood City, Calif.,-based software developer.
The Oracle employee in Denver said the company was replacing the workers with new hires in India who work for less.
The software development jobs can pay as much as $90,000, said Andrew Albarelle, principal executive at Remy Corp., a Denver staffing firm.
Oracle spokeswoman Deborah Hellinger declined to confirm the number of cuts, or to say if the workers would receive a severance package. She also wouldn’t say whether Oracle was moving the jobs to India.
The cuts came as Oracle outlined a plan to make higher profits and integrate its recent $5.85 billion purchase of Siebel Systems Inc.
By Thursday night, more than 50 former Oracle workers had posted their resumes at Remy Corp., which currently has 72 high-tech jobs it’s looking to fill, said Albarelle.
He said resumes came from technical support staff, project managers and business analysts, and he expected the workers to be in demand.
“These laid-off people are going to get snapped up by other jobs in town,” Albarelle said. “We were really running out of good, high-level people to do these jobs.”
Oracle’s Denver Tech Center office used to be the headquarters of software developer J.D. Edwards before it was bought out by Peoplesoft in 2003. Peoplesoft was acquired by Oracle last year.
Beth Potter can be reached at 303-820-1503.
