Oracle a Silicon Valley stalwart, becomes the latest technology corporation to leave California, its home state due to higher taxes, steeper costs of living, and an increasing trend of remote working. This shift to Austin from Redwood City “means that many of our employees can choose their office location as well as continue to work from home part-time or all of the time,” Oracle said during a regulatory filing.
Yet, the company will continue to extend support to its previous headquarter in California and other offices in Santa Monica, California, Seattle, Denver, Orlando, Florida, and Burlington, Massachusetts. Oracle stated that it had 135,000 employees as reported in May and like several other companies, COVID-19 has forced them to allow employees’ flexibility in the working pattern.
Oracle opened a campus in Austin back in 2018 and made available an on-site apartment building which could host 10,000 employees with an aim to welcome a younger and cost-effective workforce. The company had stated last year that its largest annual conference, OpenWorld, would make a shift from San Francisco to Las Vegas. Texas Governor Greg Abbott gave Oracle a welcome via a tweet.
This move to shift headquarters comes during Oracle’s aim of cost-shedding as they transition from traditional software to cloud computing, as this has resulted in declining revenue for two fiscal years. The company said that it expects its sales to rise by 2% to 4% by the end of February 2021.
Started in 1977, Oracle has been a foundational company in the Silicon Valley area.
“There’s no birthright that says Silicon Valley has to get all the great tech companies,” Mahoney stated in an interview before Oracle’s announcement. “But it does have a special sauce that no other place has been able to replicate.”
California remains a highly preferred place for companies due to the presence of world-class Universities and great weather, all in one place.
