‘This is 1,000 percent good for the channel,’ says Rhos Dyke, founder and Oracle Alliance Practice Lead for Acropolis Advisors. ‘Oracle direct sellers are going to be increasingly reliant on credible and capable partners that can deliver on the Oracle promise.’
Oracle partners said they see the enterprise cloud software powerhouse becoming more reliant on the channel in the wake of layoffs Tuesday 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, a Myriad360 company, 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 would not comment on just how many employees had been laid off or what impact the cuts would have on the channel. Investment bank TD Cowen earlier this year in a note said Oracle was considering layoffs of as many as 20,000 to 30,000 employees in an effort to fund its AI buildout, according to multiple reports.
A layoff of 30,000 employees would amount to about 19 percent of Oracle’s 162,000 headcount as of May 2025.
A Wave Of Employees Posting On LinkedIn
The wave of employees posting on LinkedIn about the cuts included employees in a number of areas, including sales, partnerships and security:
- An industry sales executive with Oracle for about four years who worked on “Cloud ERP, EPM, CX, and SCM” and has experience in “High-Tech Manufacturing, Oil & Gas, and Transportation sectors
- A senior application sales manager for Oracle’s Human Capital Management (HCM) product with the company for about five years;
- A senior sales executive who has been with Oracle for about three years and with Cerner for about seven years before that–Oracle acquired Cerner in 2022
- A global strategic partnerships professional who led “a $1 billion plus global strategic partnership with Microsoft, owning a 360 degree view of the relationship and ensuring measurable business impact across all business units;
- A senior director of security evaluations with the company for about 13 years who “led Oracle’s global product security certification program, focused on supporting Oracle’s cloud first strategy”
With the layoffs, Dyke said Oracle needs “credible and capable” partners to deliver on its cloud infrastructure obligations— referred to as remaining purchase obligation (RPO)—to be successful as it ramps up is cloud infrastructure sales offensive.
“If Oracle cloud consumption rates are going to pick up at the speed at which that RPO number continues to grow exponentially, they are going to need partners to make good on the Oracle promise that it can run any customer’s business on Oracle cloud in whatever environment a customer chooses, whether it’s Oracle, AWS, Microsoft or Google.”
Dyke said there is a “huge” opportunity for partners to move the 50 percent or more of the remaining Oracle licensees still on premise to the cloud. “That includes everything from database to applications, JD Edwards and all the products that Oracle owns,” he said.
Dyke said he also sees an ever-expanding Oracle global ecosystem. In fact, he said, Acropolis Advisors is also helping emerging technology partners break into the Oracle ecosystem. “These are companies with really interesting AI-enabled technology, multicloud platform security and management,” he said. “The Oracle ecosystem is growing dramatically. I see it becoming every bit as big as the Microsoft, Google and AWS ecosystems.”
Dyke said he is also heartened by the fact that Oracle has strengthened partner certification with improved revenue sharing under the new Oracle Partner Network collaborative sales model. “They have eliminated in large part pretty serious channel conflict with their Oracle PartnerNetwork collaborative sales model,” he said.
