Cerner, Oracle say they intend to ‘maintain and grow’ jobs presence in Kansas City
Cerner Corp. is the largest private employer in the Kansas City area.
On Monday, software giant Oracle announced it has reached an agreement to purchase the healthcare IT company for $28.3 billion. Almost immediately, the attention turned to jobs.
“I will speak with leaders from Cerner today about the impact of the Oracle acquisition on the 13,000 Cerner associates in the Kansas City area,” Mayor Quinton Lucas tweeted after news of the acquisition broke. “Kansas City will work hard to retain all jobs already here and to gain an even greater presence globally in healthcare technology.”
If Oracle doesn’t grow jobs in Kansas City, Lucas told The Star he wants to at least protect the 13,000 employees who already work in the area on Cerner’s payroll.
“We will make sure that every Cerner employee — whether they’re in Kansas City, Missouri, North Kansas City or somewhere else — knows there’s a local government here that will be working for them to make sure that there are still good jobs there and that we continue to have that strong presence here.”
In announcing what will be one of the largest acquisitions of the year, both companies assured that Cerner would retain a substantial jobs presence in Kansas City.
Oracle’s news release says it “intends to maintain and grow Cerner’s community presence, including in the Kansas City area.” Cerner currently employs some 28,000 people across the globe.
“As part of Oracle, Cerner expects to have a greater opportunity to grow and strengthen Kansas City as a true center of excellence for healthcare” said William Zollars, chairman of Cerner’s board. “This combination aligns a leading tech company with a leading healthcare company, enabling us to answer a higher calling that Cerner’s founders envisioned from the start. The expected result will yield a patient impact that can truly transform healthcare worldwide.”
However, mergers almost always mean job losses. Companies typically look to realize savings by cutting duplicate jobs.
Nathan Mauck, an associate professor of finance at the University of Missouri-Kansas City, pointed to Oracle’s 2004 purchase of PeopleSoft, a human resources software firm. Weeks after the $10.3 billion sale, Oracle slashed 5,000 jobs from the combined companies to realize an estimated $1 billion in merger savings.
The good news: Oracle said it would keep the vast majority of the legacy technical staff at its once-competitor PeopleSoft. So that may protect many of the software engineers and other technical experts in Cerner’s ranks, Mauck said, if not the executives and corporate support staff.
Similarly, he said Cerner may be better positioned than a company like PeopleSoft, because it doesn’t compete directly with Oracle in the electronic health record market.
But, major corporate decisions about jobs and other matters will be in the hands of Oracle leaders at that company’s Austin headquarters.
“So it just creates a lot of uncertainty…and that’s pretty much true of all mergers: the firm that previously controlled its own destiny gives up control,” Mauck said.
The Star’s Emily Curiel contributed to this story.
This story was originally published December 20, 2021 at 1:26 PM.