Oracle To Fire Thousands Of Former Sun Employees Reckons Analyst

Oracle may axe half of the Sun Microsystems' workforce of 27,000 employees when it will take the reins of the beleaguered company in the coming few weeks, an analyst at UBS AG forecasted.

The gloomy prediction came from Brent Thill, an analyst with San Francisco-based firm UBS AG, and was reported by Bloomberg News. Thill claimed that Oracle will shed around 13,800 people from Sun, when the $7.4 billion takeover closes in.

Incidentally, Oracle, the second-largest software maker in the world, has predicted $1.5 billion in operating profits from Sun Microsystems in the first financial year after the acquisition completes.

The acquisition, announced back in April last year, was delayed because the European Commission launched a probe into the deal to find out if the buyout would affect the existence of Sun’s open source MySQL database.

However, Larry Ellison, the chief executive of Oracle, had already claimed in September that the European Union’s probe had in fact creating uncertainty about the Sun’s future, as the company had reportedly been losing $100 million in month.

While Oracle has already been going through a difficult phase due to the EU’s probe into the acquisition, the prediction from the analyst could further create scepticism about the proposed takeover.