The rise and fall of Sun Microsystems

Have a look - Courtesy of Infoworld.
"Memorial Slideshow for a former Titan..."

European Works Council Statement

You may be interested in the following statement from the last European Works Council (Oracle Internal Network) regarding Oracle staff reduction plan for FY11.

Oracle Encourage open, honest dialog

But how can we conduct such an open dialog when employees can be so easily dismissed ?
We do ask for a world wide employee forum to bring this honest dialog to the management.

Impossible ? Have a look to Orange Telecom Global Works Council (GWC)

Oracle Board Opposes Sustainability Proposal

Behind the scene, marketing stuff, green washing, the hard facts are very clear about Oracle's commitments regarding environmental responsability. Positive action is hardly ever taken, and there is still very few information regarding Oracle CO2 emissions and compensations.

The internal green programs seem to be there just as a tick-box for the responsability annual report, and would definitly benefit a more ambitious developpement under direct Board Control.

Corporate guidance is mandatory to move on, but we face a no-way.

Read Full Article : Environnemental Leader
Read more : BusinessGreen Blog,

Thanks to Larry, Charles, Mark, Charles and the 5 other Managers for my 71 E purchase order

No comment.

Mark Hurd to join - Charles Philipps Leaving

The news is official now - Marc Hurd is joining Oracle and Charles Phillips leaving.

This draws new perspectives both on the Hardware battlefield and the internal social field as Hurd is known as a very serious fellow.

Read more : HP most precious trade secrets in Peril., Oracle Response like a war is started with HP, Arguments for discontinuing the partnership.

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Playing with taxes...

As shown in Oracle 10K FY10, Oracle is still decreasing its overall Tax Income provisions going from 2313 M$ in FY08, 2241 in FY09, to 2108 M$ in FY10.
In the same period, the operating income jumped from 7844 to 9062 M$ !

Despite multiple litigations on this subject, Oracle managed again an incredible performance in tax savings.

The word "Tax" is written more than 300 times in the document. It is showing the impressive amount of energy invested in Tax optimisations. Tense negociations are held worldwide with various Tax autorities, and Oracle systems, Offshore Islands screens are definitly not making the game easier for local gouvernement control.

A few quotes :

[...]our ability to repatriate funds held by our foreign subsidiaries to the United States at favorable tax
rates;

Changes in tax laws or tax rulings may have a significantly adverse impact on our effective tax rate. For
example, proposals for fundamental U.S. international tax reform, such as certain proposals by President Obama’s Administration, if enacted, could have a significant adverse impact on our effective tax rate.

[...] We previously negotiated three successive unilateral Advance Pricing Agreements with the IRS that cover many of our intercompany transfer pricing issues and preclude the IRS from making a transfer pricing adjustment within the scope of the agreements. These agreements are effective for fiscal years through May 31, 2006. We have submitted to the IRS a request for another renewal of this Advance Pricing Agreement for the years ending May 31, 2007 through May 31, 2011. However, these agreements do not cover all elements of our transfer pricing and do not bind tax authorities outside the United States.

This month, Oracle France will have to pay tens of million Euros in settlement of a dispute with the French Tax ministry. Always the question of transfer prices.
Ten Million Euros will also benefit Oracle French Employees, through a mandatory rule called "Employee Participation".
A small victory on the very very long road for more progressive and equitable taxation - who needs to be cared about : simple citizens, small companies, or huge corporations ?

To be continued - Tax Justice Network.

13 Zero Salary review countries

As the Compensation Workbench application is going online, you may be interested to read through the manager training guidelines that 13 countries are banned from the application and not available within the HR database.

This non confidential document states "Zero Budget Countries: Brazil, Japan, Austria, Belgium, Denmark, Estonia, France, Germany, Italy, Lithuania, Luxembourg, Netherlands, and Switzerland. These employees are not populated in the module."

A Clear signal from the Corporation for countries considered with too many employees ?
But will the employees staying be the most talented ones ?

Read More : FY10 Eligibility Guidelines, Oracle Compensation Philosophy, HR VP interview 2004 (Old Memories),

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Oracle sued for alleged fraud against US gov

Well, we had lots of concerns regarding the compliance and ethics code.
Seems we have our confirmation about the serious doubts of having real ethics or just just marketing sheets.

The complaint against Oracle was originally filed by an Oracle employee, who alleged that large discounts offered to other customers were hidden from government agencies.

Has there been any whisleblowing process ?
The inquiry will undoubtly give some informations.
Let's remind that a previous case was settled in 2006 over a 98 Millions USD deal, where the external whisleblower got 17 Millions USD through the false claim act...

And would'nt you want more clarity regarding haven islands Oracle operations ?
Wouldn't a false claim act be of interest - Contact Us.

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Read more : The register,

Fusion Storm Rising...

SEC has been advised that Oracle Corp approved, committed and initiated and amendment to the Sun integration plan, with 675 to 825 M$ .

"Amendment further reduces the size of Oracle’s combined workforce primarily in Europe and Asia, eliminates redundant costs resulting from the acquisition of Sun and reflects improved efficiencies in operations."

This annoucement is a serious issue as there has been no local nor Europeen Work's Council consultation.

Read more: Oracle cutting deeper at Sun Microsystems - Silicon Valley / San Jose Business Journal

Let's sacrifice some revenue...

.. for more margin.

I strongly recommand this informationweek article, dedicated to IBM, which so much explains our multinational companies behaviours.
Regarding Oracle, we could extrapolate towards :
- Kill/Purchase competitors... for less competition
- Kill consulting for less revenue reckon problems
- Continue Western countries employees layoff until significant hit on margin.

SAP to open a new front...

The announcement of Sybase beeing bought by SAP is an important move, opening the competition play in both the Apps and the Database market.
The purchase of Sybase is the fifth-largest software takeover ever, according to Bloomberg data

Read more : Business Week

Sun France Sales On Strike

This is yet quite an unusual event in our companies, but the Change In Control process really triggered anger from sales force. The sudden change in engagement procedures, sales conditions, especially the support sales ones, severly jammed the "happy merge momentum".

Oracle/Sun Management is asked to provide urgent answers to have the sales force back on line, fully engaged to fullfill their objectives without restraints.

World's second most admired company ?

For your information, an interesting comment sent to Fortune Magazine by one Oracle employee...
TO FORTUNE MAGAZINE

I looked at two of your most recent research findings and was surprised, even shocked by an inconsistency. In your list of the World’s Most Admired Companies, in the sub-list by industry Oracle appears as number 2, behind Adobe (they are both put under “Software”.) And Apple (which appears in a different category, “Hardware”) is number 1. Any casual reader would think that the two companies are almost equally “admirable.” But as anybody with any knowledge of the high-tech industry knows these two companies are as different as day and night. Apple succeeded because it has loyal customers and great products, whereas Oracle, famous for its buggy products and long-suffering customers, is doing great only because it has killed all the competition. Unable to best his competitors, Ellison has been buying them one after the other (PeopleSoft, Siebel, BEA etc.) so that now a company that wants a database system with a business software on top has only one choice: Oracle. That is hardly a mark of excellence, just of a predator winning in the business jungle with anti-trust bodies abdicating their responsibilities
So, please, don't compare Apple and Oracle, you are really mixing apples with ...bad apples.

Your methodology of basing such findings on just results and relying on fellow executives is at best disingenuous, at worst pernicious: if to be admired you only look at how profitable a business is, then you should have the Mafia on top of the list, since it’s by far the most profitable business in the world (and shares many management traits with Oracle, by the way.) My point is actually made by none other than yourselves in your list of the Best Companies to Work for. Here, since the results are based on employee surveys, Oracle is nowhere to be seen and justly so: it is (in)famous throughout the industry for the horrendous way it treats its employees. Maybe you should point out that being the most admired company is NOT synonymous with a Best Company to Work for as evidenced by the Oracle case

Keep up Beeing the bests -- But Use antics

Oracle trendemous commercial successes hide a more pityfull reality with an heavy disinvestment any many internal infrastructure areas. The FY01 2 Billion dollar internal IT economy plan, killing thousands of servers worldwide, bought a lot of centralisation, global efficiency on global processes but destroyed many precious sandboxes used in Support, Consulting, Pre-Sales.

The Oracle Virtualisation program has been very successful for customer infrastructures but keeps on beeing quite ridiculous for thousands of Oracle experts. Many of us still have to fight to build, transport, manager their VM images, with a complete lack of infrastructure sharing.
Networks, disks are kept busy transporting Virtual machines from one expert to the other, in a typical tribal image exchange.
Funding for machines is kept at the absolute minimum, without significant professional live program to build on-demand sandboxes.
Last but not least, the total shutdown of metalink external bug accesses has killed a lot of Expert Services value, in a time where value selling has never been so critical.

We feel Sun merger will not change the course of action, as we mainly miss the political strength to make things happen efficiently in the bottom-up approach.

Will any manager play its role and dare raising a voice that our way of playing internally with technology is now obsolete and having a very negative impact ?
Will employee reps voices be heard someday ?
Can success keep on going with less and less efficiency in the field ?

We still wait for official answers.

Dear Sun Employees - Resistance is futile

We do extend a very warm welcome to all Sun Employees. We do hope you will add your technological distinctiveness to our own. Regarding the biological distinctiveness, we do hope some future, but everything will be in the hand of the great architect. And in many cases, that stories are like the one below...





Do ask for World wide employee consultations and be especially careful when talking about "job mapping", a key process before any redundancies, and very important to your future within Oracle.

Sun Oracle Merger - Estern Resistance

While the EU approval definitly seems to be on the edge of a final clearance, China and Russia, massively invested in Open Source Software, recently extended their merger probes.

Read More : IT World, HelpMySQL,

Oracle & Communities - Still a lot to do

Well, we should be glad Oracle continues the emergency investments in the communities, and offering a donation match from its employees concerned by the Haiti Disaster Relief. However.
Too bad, the funding is limited to 1 Millions USD, making roughly a maximum of 10 USD per employee.

But why wouldn't Oracle show the community investment by laying done a corporate 1 million USD donation, and then appealing for extra funding though its employees.
This still sounds very limited, taking the full 2008 number of 8,5 millions USD in Oracle Donations.

And by the way, did you try to make a donation ?
You'll be asked to move to the United States, as a US State is a mandatory field in your adress !