Cerner, Oracle plans to keep Kansas City jobs after the merger

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Cerner Corp. is the largest private employer in the Kansas City area.

On Monday, software giant Oracle announced that it had reached an agreement to purchase the health information company for $ 28.3 billion. Almost immediately, the focus shifted to work.

“I will speak with Cerner leaders today about the impact of the Oracle acquisition on Cerner’s 13,000 associates in the Kansas City area,” Mayor Quinton Lucas tweeted after news of the acquisition. “Kansas City will work hard to keep all jobs already here and to gain an even greater global presence in healthcare technology.”

If Oracle doesn’t create jobs in Kansas City, Lucas told The Star he wants to at least protect the 13,000 employees who already work in Cerner’s payroll area.

“We will make sure that every employee of Cerner, whether they are in Kansas City, Missouri, North Kansas City or somewhere else, knows that there is a local government here that will work for them to make sure there are still good jobs. I work 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 have assured that Cerner will maintain a substantial job presence in Kansas City.

Oracle’s press release states it “intends to maintain and grow the presence of the Cerner community, including in the Kansas City area.” Cerner currently employs around 28,000 people worldwide.

“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 the board of Cerner. “This combination aligns a leading technology company with a leading healthcare company, enabling us to answer a higher call than the founders of Cerner envisioned from the start. The expected result will have an impact on patients that can truly transform healthcare around the world ”.

However, mergers almost always result in job losses. Businesses typically try to make savings by cutting out duplicate jobs.

Nathan Mauck, an associate professor of finance at the University of Missouri-Kansas City, indicated Oracle’s 2004 purchase of PeopleSoft, a human resources software company. Weeks after the $ 10.3 billion sale, Oracle cut 5,000 jobs from the combined companies to make an estimated $ 1 billion savings in the merger.

The good news: Oracle said it will retain the vast majority of the legacy engineering staff at its former competitor PeopleSoft. So that could protect many of the software engineers and other technical experts in Cerner’s ranks, Mauck said, if not corporate executives and support staff.

Likewise, he said Cerner may be in a better position than a company like PeopleSoft, because it doesn’t compete directly with Oracle in the electronic health records market.

However, major business decisions about jobs and other issues will be in the hands of Oracle leaders at the company’s Austin headquarters.

“So it just creates a lot of uncertainty … and that’s pretty much true for all mergers – the company that previously controlled its own fate gives up control,” said Mauck.

The Star’s Emily Curiel contributed to this story.

This story was originally posted on December 20, 2021 at 1:26 pm.

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