It’s the best and worst of times at Oracle.
The enterprise tech giant is slashing hundreds of jobs within its healthcare unit, according to a new report in Business Insider. It’s also rescinding job offers and paring back open roles.
The layoffs “were due in large part to Cerner's challenged work with the US Department of Veterans Affairs, which hired Cerner to replace its homemade medical records with Cerner's technology,” the publication added. The Cerner rollout was paused in April due to implementation errors.
However, Oracle has seen its stock price skyrocket, thanks in large part to generative A.I. After years of struggling against cloud titans such as Amazon Web Services (AWS) and Microsoft Azure, the company is also enjoying more success with its own cloud options, with its cloud infrastructure revenue rising 76 percent year-over-year.
If Oracle is truly gaining some momentum, it could change the game for cloud specialists. In last year’s edition of the Stack Overflow Developer Survey, some 51 percent of respondents utilized AWS, followed by Microsoft Azure at 28.72 percent and Google Cloud at 26.81 percent; meanwhile, Oracle Cloud Infrastructure lagged far behind at 2.18 percent. Should Oracle seize more market share in coming years, tech professionals will need to decide whether to devote more time and resources to learning the intricacies of its cloud tech.
For those who want an introduction to Oracle’s cloud, Oracle offers a tutorial in cloud infrastructure basics. There’s also plenty of Oracle-hosted documentation about setting up and maintaining that infrastructure. If you want instruction from a non-Oracle source, you can find it via a number of online platforms, including Udemy and Coursera.
Oracle plans on marketing generative A.I. services, with a focus on automating customer service and enterprise processes. Oracle is a significant investor in an A.I. startup named Cohere, which will use Oracle’s cloud to train and deploy its A.I. models. While Google’s Bard and OpenAI’s ChatGPT have dominated the generative A.I. conversation so far, tech professionals who specialize in the enterprise may need to pay close attention to what Oracle is doing in this area.
Tech is a rapidly evolving industry. Yesterday’s giants fade away; aging companies can stage a huge comeback. For tech professionals, that means you have to stay aware of the overall market, and how one company’s fortunes can impact the tools and infrastructure you use.
