Since buying health IT giant Cerner for about $28 billion, Oracle has halted raises and promotions and laid off thousands of employees in the unit, four current and former employees told Insider.
After the acquisition closed in June, Oracle has laid off more than 3,000 of the 28,000 original Cerner employees, one of the people said. It also has not issued raises or granted promotions, and, earlier this year, announced that workers shouldn't expect any through 2023, two of them said.
Layoffs, which have occurred as recently as this month, have affected workers across teams, including marketing, engineering, accounting, legal, and product, a former employee said. Oracle declined to comment.
While such restructuring is common after a company acquires another the size of Cerner, between the cuts, wage freezes, and Oracle selling Cerner's buildings in Kansas City — where Cerner has historically been a major employer — morale within the Cerner workforce is "terrible," a former Cerner executive told Insider.
The unit has also seen significant leadership turnover.
Dr. David Feinberg, tapped to lead Cerner as CEO prior to the Oracle acquisition, has been sidelined in a largely "ceremonial" role, a former employee with knowledge of the matter said. According to his LinkedIn, Feinberg left the CEO role in September before becoming "chairman" of Oracle Health. Feinberg did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
Soon after the acquisition closed, Ellison brought in Don Johnson — the former Oracle Cloud Infrastructure (OCI) boss once named by Ellison as a potential contender for co-CEO — to run engineering for a combined unit called Oracle Health and AI. Johnson abruptly left the post in January.
After Johnson left, Oracle moved data and artificial-intelligence back under its cloud business. Oracle's vice president of AI and data-science services, Elad Ziklik, wrote in an email viewed by Insider at the time that the team would "absolutely continue to focus on healthcare, and this will remain one of our top priorities across the org."
Internally, the face of the unit appears to be Oracle Health General Manager Travis Dalton, who has been in charge of all-hands meetings.
Cerner is Oracle's largest-ever acquisition, and insiders say it has become a primary focus for cofounder Larry Ellison, who has a vision for a "revolutionary" health data system in the cloud for providers and public-health officials to access patient data across organizations.
That grand vision is already facing its first test. Oracle Health is in charge of a contract worth several billion dollars to overhaul the US Department of Veterans Affairs' information systems. The VA last month paused the rollout, which has moved at a glacial pace since starting in 2020, to fix issues at five sites already using the system.
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