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After weeks saying that Oracle's long-time executive, Thomas Kurian, was taking a well-deserved break and that he was expected "back," Oracle announced Friday that Kurian had resigned.
We understand that last week Oracle raised T.K. Anand must assume many responsibilities of Kurian, telling employees at the time that his promotion was temporary until Kurian returned. Oracle declined to comment on Anand's current role within the company. Therefore, it is not clear whether he is holding the position permanently or whether he is just on trial.
Oracle said that many other responsibilities have been attributed to Kurian. That would make sense, since 35,000 people in 32 countries, about a quarter of the company, reported to him, according to Kurian's LinkedIn profile.
T.K. Anand is an interesting choice to lead Oracle's most important engineering unit because it is an Oracle outsider. He joined the company in June after a 22-year career in engineering at Microsoft, becoming general manager of Microsoft's cloud division, according to his LinkedIn profile.
We can understand why Oracle could like its background. Microsoft, like Oracle, is currently fighting Amazon in the cloud. In addition, Microsoft is widely regarded as the largest competitor among large companies, which are also Oracle's main customers.
Kurian, who had been working for Oracle since 1996 and was so close to Oracle's founder, president and chief technical officer, Larry Ellison, was also an underdog that Kurian would once have claimed to be running for president if Ellison were to retire.
The company says that Kurian 's resignation officially came on Sept. 28 and that he left to "pursue other opportunities". But no one inside Oracle is surprised.
Kurian was one of Oracle's oldest technical managers. He was responsible for Oracle's very important cloud business. His exodus was revealed earlier this month, CNBC's Jordan Novet announced for the first time.
Although his departure was described as an "extended" leave, Business Insider published a copy of his email for the troops and appears to have used a language that sounded like a last goodbye.
In the company, nobody among the employees of the base was waiting for him, told us an insider. This, although Mark Hurd held the official official line with analysts several times during last week's quarterly teleconference, repeatedly declaring Kurian's departure: "He took a break, we are waiting for his return."
Kurian would have left because he was making fun of his boss, Ellison, about the direction of the company's cloud computing sector, which, as we reported previously, has a lot of sense.
The Oracle cloud is years behind the Amazon market leader in terms of features. It will take billions of dollars to Oracle and maybe several years to catch up with Amazon, if that's possible.
Amazon does not stay still, but adds features at an ever-increasing pace, hundreds or more per quarter. And now, Amazon has launched a direct attack to drive Oracle's customers away, not just from Oracle's nascent cloud, but from its very important database, the technology on which its entire empire rests.
All this put Kurian and his team on the hot seat.
While some parts of Oracle's cloud business have performed extremely well, there are signs that the cloud is not doing as well as the company wants.
As previously reported Business Insider, members of the huge Oracle sales force used tips for making sales in the cloud, even customers who were not interested and who did not want to. did not use the cloud, which caused the North American sales manager to write an email all to make it fall.
At the same time, although Oracle customers tend to like its products, they also complain that Oracle uses contract tips to reduce them.
In 2015, Business Insider was reporting a tactic of auditing a customer to verify that he was using Oracle tech in accordance with the software license. If she finds something wrong, she can send a big bill. An Oracle representative can then tell the customer that, to reduce the bill, the customer has to buy some cloud services even if he does not want or need the cloud service.
Such audits are still ongoing, says an Oracle insider.
In addition, leading Oracle executives did not perceive some performance payments related to cloud goals, they stopped reporting openly their cloud revenues and Oracle did not meet the expectations of the cloud. analysts for its last quarter.
None of this means that Oracle is in a desperate sandbox, but things seem more bumpy than she would like to admit.
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