Oracle plans to lay off up to 1,000 workers in Europe,
despite strong revenue growth compared with other enterprise
software suppliers.
According to
French
unions, Oracle said the planned cuts are due to forecasts that
growth in Europe will be slower than expected.
Oracle is one of the last major technology companies to
undertake significant layoffs in the economic downturn, joining
EMC, Hewlett-Packard, IBM, Intel, Microsoft and SAP.
News of the 1% cut in Oracle's global workforce comes less than
a week after Thomas Kurian, SVP of product development at Oracle
said operational margins were up 50%.
These margins were enabled by "tight costs controls" that will
help maintain Oracle's multi-billion-dollar R&D budget, he said
at the launch of
Oracle Fusion Middleware 11g in London last week.
News of the staff cuts comes less than three months after Oracle
announced a
$7.4bn deal to buy Sun Microsystems.