The Blog

  • September 27, 2016
  • Oracle earnings call

    traveljourneyOracle goes into its annual customer conference, Oracle OpenWorld, flying high according to the news from its earnings call on September 15. It’s clear that the company has succeeded in pivoting from on premise to cloud software offerings and while the vendor will continue servicing its on-premise customers, the revenue acceleration from cloud products and services suggest that Oracle will derive an increasing share of its revenues from cloud solutions in the future.

    Co-CEO Safra Catz told the earnings call that combined revenue from cloud, SaaS, and PaaS for the quarter was up 82 percent from the prior year and above 80 percent of her guidance to analysts at $816 million. According to the company, organic growth in SaaS and PaaS has now accelerated for seven straight quarters. It was a very good quarter for Oracle.

    CTO and founder Larry Ellison said that the growth was primarily from new business and not from converting a large number of Oracle’s customer base to cloud solutions. This is significant because the customer base is seen as a huge reservoir of future business. However, it must be noted that in another part of the presentation Catz said that license revenues were down, a natural consequence of the shift to cloud computing but one that nevertheless must be stated.

    While Oracle’s cloud revenue growth was significant and overall revenues were substantial, at $8.7 billion, the company still has some distance to travel to reach the performance of some competitors like Salesforce.com. Salesforce’s annual revenues are roughly on a par with Oracle’s quarterly revenues, but Salesforce captures all of its revenues—north of $2 billion in a quarter—from cloud operations.

    Additionally, although Oracle’s cloud revenues are significant, executives are careful to point out that they come from infrastructure services as well as software as a service. Oracle competes with companies like Amazon whose AWS services deliver running computer hardware with operating systems and databases pre-installed so that customers can install and run their software without the effort expended in installing and managing this infrastructure.

    So while Oracle’s cloud revenues are impressive they also are not a direct comparison with pure cloud companies but that’s to be expected given its position and large legacy base. But success is success and Oracle has now established the momentum and a credible claim to being a major player in the new world of cloud computing at a time when much of its installed customer base must be wondering about what comes next and how to reduce the costs associated with running a modern IT department.

    Cloud solutions are clearly a part of any long term corporate technology direction and the news shared by Oracle this week will help the company’s cause next week as it makes its annual pitch to customers to further invest in its products and services.

     

    Published: 7 years ago


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