ldprod - stock.adobe.com

Oracle results: Revenue flat, cloud progress claimed

Full-year 2018-19 results show revenue flat to slight, but executives claim cloud headway and progress on autonomous database uptake

Oracle has announced full-year revenue of $39.5bn, roughly on a par with last year’s sales, reported as $39.8bn. Revenue for the fourth quarter of this fiscal year was $11.1bn, up 1%.

The supplier also claimed to be making good ground in shifting its applications to cloud delivery.

In a financial analyst call, transcribed by the Seeking Alpha news site, co-CEO Mark Hurd bullishly said: “In SaaS [software as a service] revenue and bookings, let me just give you a few stats. Overall, ERP [enterprise resource planning] and HCM [human capital management] annualised SaaS revenue is now at $2.9bn, or call it $3bn, and it was up in the high 20s. Fusion apps revenue was plus 36% in Q4, and up 32% for the full year. Fusion HCM was up 25% in Q4, solid growth, with nice wins. Fusion ERP revenue was up 44% and also up 44% for the full year. NetSuite ERP was up 28% in Q4, as the strong momentum continues.”

Among the “nice wins” Hurd mentioned were Experian, oil and gas drilling company Helmerich & Payne, and Tiffany.

Fellow co-CEO Safra Catz said in a press statement: “Our high-margin Fusion and NetSuite cloud applications businesses are growing rapidly, while we downsize our low-margin legacy hardware business. The net result of this shift away from commodity hardware to cloud applications was a Q4 non-GAAP operating margin of 47% – the highest we’ve seen in five years.”

On the analyst call, Catz added: “Technology licence growth was up 19% [for the quarter], making it abundantly clear that customers are investing in the Oracle platform. The key database options necessary to run the Oracle autonomous database service grew 21%.”

The supplier does not report cloud numbers separately, and attracted financial analyst criticism for that last year. For the quarter it reported, again blending the numbers: “Cloud Services and Licence Support revenues were $6.8bn, while Cloud Licence and On-Premise Licence revenues were $2.5bn. Total Cloud Services and Licence Support plus Cloud Licence and On-Premise Licence revenues were $9.3bn, up 3% in USD and 6% in constant currency.”

Oracle chairman and CTO Larry Ellison said regarding the database side of the Oracle house: “We added over 5,000 new autonomous database trials in Q4.

“Our new Gen2 Cloud Infrastructure offers those customers a compelling array of advanced technology features including our self-driving database that automatically encrypts all your data, backs itself up, tunes itself, upgrades itself, and patches itself when a security threat is detected. It does all of this autonomously – while running – without the need for any human intervention, and without the need for any downtime. No other cloud infrastructure provides anything close to these autonomous features.”

Read more about enterprise IT results

Read more on Business applications

CIO
Security
Networking
Data Center
Data Management
Close