Company: Oracle
Date: 2015-03-21
Overall rating: 3/5
Employment status: former

A Decade Long Transformational Ride
Pros: * Like most at Oracle, came through an acquisition and became part of the GBU strategy.
* (Still) great talent within the building but slowly but they are leaving.
* Great brand recognition
* Great benefits
* Great culture, benefits and camaraderie with prior regime (with Charles Phillips as lead President, he unfortunately left in 2010).
* Larry is a brillant entrepreneur but disengaged.
Cons: * Hurd/Safra are not technologists; they are financial engineers.  No vision.
* Too many disparate product teams, sales teams, etc... Most products are sold as "best of breed" without integration.
* Best of breed is dated.  Most of the applications driving the company from the $8b to $40b transformation (2005-2010) are no longer relevant.
* Hurd has brought the HP/NCR culture of Doubling everyone's quota/shrinking everyone's quota = margin expansion.
* Hurd has brought out the cost cutting around R&D too.  
* Most of the top talent leave within a few years after their company is acquired.
* Siebel folks went to Salesforce, Peoplesoft folks went to Workday, Oracle Tech folks went to MongoDB,  Retek folks went to Infor, Hyperion folks went to Annaplan.
* No camaraderie; literally 3 companies all the way up to Larry (GBUs, ERP and Technology).  
* No culture anymore.  Company has lost both it's vision and it's ability to execute.