Oracle plans to boost staffing levels across EMEA, recruiting 1700 people across all areas of the business and at all levels, from graduates to senior sales staff.
The details aren’t known as yet but we would expect significant hires in the cloud area and around hardware. During its Q4 earnings call in June CEO Larry Ellison said the company was going to add further sales people to the hardware division, which saw a 6% drop in sales year on year (see Oracle: apps and database rise, hardware drops). We also noted at the time that the rate of growth in Oracle’s albeit large cloud business had slowed over the year, which is something it probably feels impelled to change. We would also expect additional hires in regions such as MENA, which are still relatively fresh markets for Oracle and other software vendors. How many new faces will join the UK is hard to predict as software vendors in general have been noting that the UK market is softer than in other European countries.
Having put a temporary halt to acquisitions on the grounds that they are too expensive at the moment, although it did announce a small acquisition in June (see Oracle acquires FatWire to boost customer-facing tools), Oracle has a large pocketful of cash. If it cannot spend it outside the business, clearly it will spend it internally. It will be interesting to see how Oracle fares when all its efforts are focused on organic growth.