That's exactly what they did. In the past year or so they've migrated everybody from a custom DBA type arrangement to a self-serve DBaaS system. They've also turned over the keys for people to do their admin stuff in a self-serve way in the on-premises-hosted cloud. You can now spin up an onsite VM very easily and do your thing, without letting the precious-precious flow outside of Intel at any time to e.g. AWS, Azure etc. (Though if what you do is below a certain secrecy level, you can do that too.)

The downside is that for those applications that have tried to stay on the custom model (cough), IT service quality and quantity has gone straight down the shitter. You can submit help tickets and like never hear back. I guess now I know why - it wasn't so much "Thanks for coming, enjoy your stay" as it was "Run for the lifeboats, we're sinking the ship!"

> I suspect that they've migrated these databases to versions that don't require as much heavy oversight.

I think you're giving the bean counting process too much credit. AFAIK they go by abstract criteria (organization/location/job role/performance/etc.). I doubt they go by (or even know or care) how much actual work is being supported by the person.

The article implies they're more on the side of IT.