Oracle axed more than 1,000 employees in September

Cuts signify Oracle's continued restructuring towards the cloud

Oracle axed more than 1,000 jobs earlier this month, confirming rumours that surfaced earlier in the year.

The company filed a notice under California's Worker Adjustment and Retraining Notification (WARN) regulations, which revealed that 1,008 permanent layoffs would be made in its Santa Clara and San Diego facilities, as first reported by The Register.

In total, 964 employees were notified on September 1 that they would no longer be required at the company's Santa Clara base from October 31. A further 54 employees, based in San Diego, were notified of the decision at the end of August, and they too will be let go on October 31.

This is the second round of layoffs to hit the Santa Clara facilities this year; Oracle had let 450 staff from its hardware systems division go back in January. The facility had been occupied by Sun Microsystems, which Oracle acquired for £5.6bn in 2010, together with the Solaris operating system, SPARC microprocessors and other hardware products. The cuts are another sign of the firm's shift away from traditional hardware and software and into the cloud - with its software licensing and hardware revenue falling, and its software-as-a-service revenue on the up.

However, it is unlikely that Solaris will be abandoned completely as Oracle recently released a roadmap which includes a new version of the OS, albeit with a later release date than previously planned.

Back in January, anonymous postings on layoff.com, a website where employees write about being made redundant, suggested that Oracle would follow-up the 450 redundancies in January with further cuts.

Now, several employees from the company have reported the latest cuts across Solaris and other hardware units on Twitter and anonymously on layoff.com, with some reports suggesting that the latest wave of layoffs could affect up to 2,500 employees in total.