Head in the clouds? Apparently there's now space on Oracle's sales team

Oracle is continuing to head into the cloud, kicking off another recruitment drive for 1,000 fluffy white services sales people – but the news comes amid talk of reorganisation and layoffs elsewhere.

The company is flying high on its latest quarterly results – released last month – that had much of Wall Street finally singing its praises.

The results showed cloud and SaaS accounted for 10 per cent of its total revenue in Q4 of fiscal '17 ended May 31, the cloud revenue hitting $1.36bn, up 58 per cent from the year-ago quarter.

Oracle co-CEO Safra Katz said at the time that cloud was now "our predominant growth vehicle" as the company shifted away from the "drag" of hardware and on-prem software.

Larry Ellison's lot is now throwing more salespeople at the cloud, offering jobs to 1,000 humans to join the EMEA region by January 2018.

A canned statement from Oracle says the recruitment is aimed at people with a "strong sense of personal drive" who have between "two and six years work experience" – which, as some observers have pointed out, pretty much rules out most over-30s.

The bid to swell the payroll comes after continued industry talk of layoffs and hiring freezes elsewhere in the company – and, as revealed by The Reg in May, Big Red is in the process of a massive sales reorganisation.

This was expected to involve a cut of up to two-thirds of its classic sales force over the summer – and followed separate news of job losses in its hardware division in January this year.

There is also pressure on Oracle to make sure that its new cloudy earnings are sustainable.

The company needs to make sure the cloud is embedded in new customers – we've heard that some are getting daily calls from Oracle "customer success managers" urging them to use the service – who will renew licences.

Oracle has also today announced an expansion of its Oracle Cloud at Customer product, which aims to persuade organisations worried about where their data is stored to make the move to the cloud.

Oracle Cloud at Customer, launched last year, gives them a choice in where their data and applications live, installing Oracle's cloud software in their data centres and behind their paywalls.

The cloudy service uses the same interface and tools as the public cloud, which Oracle has claimed makes it easier to deploy a hybrid cloud.

The expansion will see its customers given access to all of Oracle's major PaaS categories, including database, analytics, big data and identity management, as well as SaaS services like enterprise Resource Planning and Customer Relationship Management. ®