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back to article Oracle pulled made-up cloud figures out of its SaaS – whistleblower

An ex-Oracle staffer claims she was fired for refusing to keep quiet about the database giant's exaggerated cloud sales. On Wednesday, Svetlana Blackburn filed a whistleblower lawsuit with the US district court in San Francisco, alleging that she was dismissed on October 15 last year – two months after being given a positive …

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  1. a_yank_lurker

    Coverup?

    With traditional licensing and sales basically flatlining or falling it is not surprising that someone would try Hollywood accounting to make the books look good. The problem with Hollywood accounting is it not about padding numbers but inflating costs in such away to move the actual profits to the studios pockets in such a way movies show a paper loss. Leisure Larry's minions forgot the first rule of creative accounting - you have to have actual profits to move.

    3 1 Reply
    1. Anonymous Coward
      Reply Icon
      Anonymous Coward

      Re: Coverup?

      It is kind of surprising that they decided to just make up numbers. The easier approach is just to use the ambiguous definition of 'cloud' to their advantage and call some on prem revenues 'cloud'. It is misleading, but no one can technically call you out for it. Look at VMware (basically the opposite of cloud in the AWS, Google definition) just deciding to call their old virtualization software 'cloud'.

      1 0 Reply
  2. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    Not surprised

    It seems like most of the legacy vendors are playing fast and loose with cloud revenues. Oracle seems to have just been completely fabricating numbers. Most companies just decide to call legacy products, e.g. virtualization software on prem, 'cloud' revenues.

    1 0 Reply
  3. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    Defend vigorously....

    .... Pay quietly.

    And that's how it goes.

    1 0 Reply
  4. Aristotles slow and dimwitted horse

    It's kind of what Enron did...

    Although sightly different from a financial accounting perspective, it has the same feel to the Enron debacle. Look how that worked out...

    5 0 Reply
  5. StaudN
    Angel

    Who'd have thought it?

    An accountant with principles. Good on her.

    8 0 Reply
  6. SecretSonOfHG

    The real surprise

    Is to see someone in that stratified corporate world that still keeps some decency, and good enough to be fired for it. And brave enough to challenge its employer in court.

    0 0 Reply

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