Oracle Layoffs Hit Sales, Engineering, Security: 5 Things To Know

‘This could help us expand the relationship with Oracle to provide additional value to our customers,’ C.R. Howdyshell, CEO of Advizex, a Myriad360 company, said.

Oracle’s latest round of layoffs cuts across products, divisions and geographies of the Austin, Texas-based cloud and database products giant as the company focuses on the artificial intelligence opportunity and increasing margins from its AI business.

CRN examined posts on LinkedIn by former and outgoing Oracle employees to find trends about where the vendor is making the job cuts, which could number in the tens of thousands, according to multiple reports. Multiple news outlets have reported estimates by investment bank TD Cowen of as many as 30,000 Oracle job cuts. A layoff of 30,000 employees would amount to about 19 percent of Oracle’s 162,000 headcount, as of May 2025.

Oracle’s wave of layoffs appears to have included engineers, managers, directors and other job titles in security, sales, the NetSuite division and other parts of the company.

[RELATED: Atlassian Plans 1,600 Layoffs With Savings Shift To AI, Enterprise Sales]

Oracle Layoffs: What We Know So Far

In an email to CRN, an Oracle spokesperson said the company declined to comment on the reported layoffs.

The employee cuts also reached the channel motion of Oracle’s NetSuite division, which has said to expect greater investments and focus on deal-level incentives, certification and training, program and other partner marketing and other channel budget areas over the next 12 months, according to CRN’s 2026 Partner Program Guide.

The Oracle layoffs have had a slow drumbeat throughout the month, with reports of coming job cuts first surfacing at the start of March and Oracle increasing its 2026 restructuring plan by an extra $500 million–bringing the costs up to $2.1 billion–before Oracle employees started posting publicly about layoffs on Tuesday.

Oracle solution providers who spoke with CRN about the layoffs were positive about fewer employees within the vendor potentially pushing more work out to the channel amid a rush of demand for a variety of Oracle products.

Rhos Dyke, founder and Oracle alliance practice lead for Acropolis Advisors, based in Manhattan Beach, Calif., said there is a “huge” opportunity for partners to move the 50 percent or more of the remaining Oracle licensees that are still on premises to the cloud. “That includes everything from database to applications, JD Edwards and all the products that Oracle owns,” he said.

Oracle isn’t alone in pursuing layoffs in 2026 as the battle for AI dominance heats up. Other vendors that have announced or conducted layoffs so far this year include Atlassian, Amazon Web Services, Autodesk and Kaseya.

Here’s more of what you need to know about the Oracle layoffs and where the vendor is putting less priority in its expenditures–and potentially where AI is making inroads in automating once-manual tasks.

Oracle Layoffs Hit Go-To-Market Roles

Based on LinkedIn posts by former and outgoing Oracle employees who said they have been caught up in this round of layoffs, much of the job cuts hit roles in go-to-market, sales, customer success, marketing and partnership positions.

The employees not only worked on core Oracle products, but also its NetSuite cloud-based enterprise resource planning (ERP) division and the Oracle Health electronic health record (EHR) unit that received a boost from the Cerner acquisition.

Oracle bought NetSuite in 2016 and Cerner in 2022.

These cuts include a channel account manager with NetSuite for about five years who oversaw “a portfolio of 90–150 mid-market and corporate customer accounts representing $10M+ in ARR within the NetSuite partner ecosystem,” according to the employee’s post and profile on LinkedIn.

A global strategic partnerships professional who led “a $1B+ global strategic partnership with Microsoft, owning a 360° view of the relationship and ensuring measurable business impact across all business units” was also among the cuts, according to his LinkedIn post and profile.

Other roles fitting that category include:

Engineering Roles Hit In Layoffs

Oracle made cuts to roles involved in engineering, site reliability and project delivery as well. The employees worked on enterprise engineering, SQL and other parts of the Oracle product portfolio.

Some of the displaced employees in this line of work include:

Security Another Oracle Target Area

Oracle employees involved in security, threat evaluation and similar roles were also caught up in the job cuts.

Employees affected by the layoffs in this category include:

Oracle Partners Say Layoffs Could Push More Work To The Channel

Oracle partners said they see the enterprise cloud software powerhouse becoming more reliant on the channel in the wake of the layoffs that reports say impact thousands of employees.

“This is 1,000-percent good for the channel,” said Rhos Dyke, founder and Oracle alliance practice lead for Acropolis Advisors, a Manhattan Beach, Calif.-based Oracle solution provider.

“Oracle direct sellers are going to be increasingly reliant on credible and capable partners that can deliver on the Oracle promise. I have been selling Oracle solutions for three decades, and the opportunity has never been bigger or better. I’m never retiring. This layoff is only going to mean more opportunity for the channel. This makes Oracle leaner and meaner in a positive way. Those partners that abandoned Oracle 10 years ago should take another look. If they don’t, they are missing a huge opportunity.”

C.R. Howdyshell, the CEO of Advizex–an Independence, Ohio-based Myriad360 company and member of CRN’s 2026 MSP 500–said he also sees the potential for Oracle to rely more heavily on channel partners. “If they have less direct sellers it benefits the channel,” said Howdyshell. “We are certified in all of the Oracle products. Oracle partners have to have the resources, people and relationships that Oracle believes in. They are very selective and demanding of their partners. This could help us expand the relationship with Oracle to provide additional value to our customers.”

Howdyshell said Advizex has had a two-decade relationship with Oracle and is hoping with the layoffs Oracle will step up its engagement with the channel. “Oracle could really benefit by embracing the channel as more customers look to us to help them chart their AI and cloud strategy,” he said. “If this results in increased opportunity for the channel, we would be willing to invest more in the Oracle go-to-market strategy.”

Oracle Layoffs Come As Executives Push Internal AI Tools

During Oracle’s latest quarterly earnings call Tuesday, company executives said they are increasingly embracing AI tools internally to revolutionize product development.

Larry Ellison, the company’s chief technology officer who co-founded Oracle in 1977, said on the call that Oracle coding tools allow it to build a comprehensive set of agents for automating entire health care and financial services ecosystems.

Ellison and Oracle co-CEO Mike Sicilia dismissed concerns around a “SaaSpocalypse” of more traditional enterprise software-as-a-service vendors getting disrupted by artificial intelligence upstarts including Claude maker Anthropic and ChatGPT maker OpenAI–with single-focus SaaS vendors being more vulnerable to disruption than the database products giant.

“You’ve all heard the thesis or theory that new companies coding quickly using AI will spell the death of SaaS–I don’t agree with that at all,” Sicilia said. “I do think that AI tools and their coding capabilities would be a threat if we weren’t adopting them, but we are. Very rapidly.”

Oracle’s embrace of new AI tools are part of “why we think we’re a disruptor,” Ellison said on the call. “That’s why we think the SaaSpocalypse applies to others.”

Measures Oracle executives shared on the call that illustrate its growing AI business include the company delivering more than 1,000 agents in its horizontal backoffice and industry apps, not including customer-built agents and agents Oracle uses internally. In the quarter, Oracle saw more than 2,000 customers go live with Oracle application projects.

In February, Oracle revealed that it wants to raise $45 billion to $50 billion of gross cash proceeds during the 2026 calendar year using a balanced combination of debt and equity financing. The financing will go to the OCI business and building additional capacity to meet the contracted demand from Advanced Micro Devices (AMD), Nvidia, Facebook parent Meta, ChatGPT maker OpenAI, Elon Musk’s xAI, TikTok and other large OCI customers.