Category Archives: Larry Ellison

Financial Results, Larry Ellison, News & Analysis, Oracle, Quarterlies, quarterly results, Safra Catz, Salesforce

Oracle Q4 cloud revenues grow 29%, down 5% overall

Larry Ellison said the company's cloud revenue will eclipse Salesforce's revenue this year

Larry Ellison said the company’s cloud revenue will eclipse Salesforce’s revenue this year

Oracle Corporation has announced its 2015 fiscal Q4 quarterly earnings, unveiling impressive growth for its PaaS and SaaS business, which is up 29% on last year. The company posted overall revenue of $10.7 billion however, down 5% year on year.

After a bullish announcement of its Q3 results in March, where Oracle boss Larry Ellison publicly called out rival Salesforce, the software giant posted Software and Cloud business revenues at $8.4bn, down 6% year on year, while its SaaS and PaaS revenues came in at $416m.

Announcing the decline in revenues, Oracle was hasty to point the finger at the fluctuating strength of the US dollar against international exchange rates; it claimed total revenues would have been up 3%, software and cloud revenues up 2% and SaaS and PaaS growth 35% instead of 29% year on year, blaming the strengthening of the U.S. dollar.

Oracle CEO Safra Catz is expecting the growth of its SaaS and PaaS revenues to kick up a notch in fiscal year 2016.

“We sold an astonishing $426 million of new SaaS and PaaS annually recurring cloud subscription revenue in Q4,” he said. “We expect our rapidly increasing cloud sales to quickly translate into significantly more revenue and profits for Oracle Corporation.” For example, SaaS and PaaS revenues grew at a 34% constant currency rate in our just completed Q4, but we expect that revenue growth rate to jump to around 60% in constant currency this new fiscal year.”

In highlighting his firm’s ambition for the coming fiscal year, Ellison again took the chance to name-check one of Oracle’s main competitors.

“We expect to book between $1.5 and $2.0 billion of new SaaS and PaaS business this fiscal year,” he said. “That means Oracle would sell more new SaaS and PaaS business than salesforce.com plans to sell in their current fiscal year – the only remaining question is how much more. Oracle’s planned SaaS and PaaS revenue growth is around 60% in constant currency; salesforce.com has a planned growth rate of around 20%. When you contrast those growth rates it becomes clear that Oracle is on its way to becoming the world’s largest enterprise cloud company.”

Larry Ellison, Marc Benioff, Mark Hurd, News & Analysis, Oracle, Salesforce, SAP

Oracle hits out at Salesforce as cloud revenue grows

Larry Ellison said the company's cloud revenue will eclipse Salesforce's revenue this year

Larry Ellison said the company’s cloud revenue will eclipse Salesforce’s revenue this year

Oracle reported SaaS and PaaS revenues of $375m for the third quarter 2015, up 33 per cent from the previous year, with the company’s cloud services now growing at a quicker rate than those offered by Salesforce according to Oracle chief technology officer Larry Ellison.

While Oracle reported strong growth in its cloud services segment, the company’s overall revenues, however, remained flat at $9.3bn, with a 2 per cent decline in hardware systems revenue (to $1.3bn) and operating income down 5 per cent to $3.4bn.

Nevertheless, the company’s executives were quite pleased with the results.

“In Q3, we sold nearly $200 million of new SaaS and PaaS business as measured in annual recurring revenue,” said Oracle chief executive officer Mark Hurd.

“In Q4, we expect to sell over $300 million of new SaaS and PaaS annual recurring revenue. That means we have a real chance to sell more SaaS and PaaS new business this coming quarter than any other cloud services provider. I think our hyper-growth in the cloud comes as a big surprise to a lot of people,” Hurd said.

Ellison was less inclined to mince words in a call with press and analysts this week, calling out one of its biggest direct competitors in the CRM space – Salesforce.

“Oracle now has a cloud revenue run rate of well over $2 billion a year. We’re already the world’s second-largest SaaS and PaaS company. On our last quarterly conference call, I predicted that in our fiscal year 2016 Oracle would likely sell more SaaS and PaaS new business than Salesforce.com. Well, I was way too cautious.”

“I now believe that Oracle will sell more new SaaS and PaaS business than Salesforce.com in this current calendar year, 2015,” he said.

This kind of rhetoric isn’t uncommon among the awkward yet symbiotic trio, SAP, Oracle and Salesforce, which to some extent have come to epitomise the dynamic between the large slower moving incumbent and the smaller but rapidly growing new kid on the block.

Last month Salesforce, which is led by ex-Oracle executive Marc Benioff, announced a record fourth quarter with full fiscal year 2015 revenue hitting $5.37bn. In a call with press and analysts to discuss the results Salesforce vice chairman and president Keith Block said it achieved those results “right in SAP’s backyard.”

Amazon AWS, IaaS, Larry Ellison, Oracle, Oracle Corporation, Private Cloud

Oracle Going Up Against Amazon with New Cloud Offerings

Oracle’s Larry Ellison once called cloud computing “Complete gibberish” but now Oracle is fully in the Cloud game with new announcements, which BusinessInsider covered in a story over the weekend.

There are two versions of Oracle’s new IaaS cloud. One is a “public cloud” similar to the kind of clouds offered by Amazon, Rackspace, HP, and others, where the hardware is located in Oracle’s data centers. It includes compute services and storage services, Ellison said.

The second is the so-called Oracle Private cloud, where a replica of Oracle’s public cloud is put in the customer’s own data center. Oracle would still own the hardware and be responsible for running it, securing it and updating it

Read the article.


Cloudify, Guest Post, High Tech Security, Larry Ellison, OpenStack, Steve Wozniak, Wozniak

Woz is Worried About “Everything Going to the Cloud” — the Real Issue is Giving Up Control

Guest Post By Nati Shalom, CTO and Founder of GigaSpaces

In a recent article, Steve Wozniak, who co-founded Apple with the late Steve Jobs, predicted “horrible problems” in the coming years as cloud-based computing takes hold. 

“I really worry about everything going to the cloud,”.. “I think it’s going to be horrendous. I think there are going to be a lot of horrible problems in the  next five years. ….“…with the cloud, you don’t own anything. You already signed it away.”

When I first read the title I thought, Wozniak sounds like Larry Ellison two years ago, when he pitched the Cloud is hype, before he made a 180-degree turn to acknowledge Oracle wished to be a cloud vendor too. 

Reading it more carefully, I realized the framing of the topic is instead just misleading. Wozniak actually touches on something that I hear more often, as the cloud hype cycle is moves from a Peak of Inflated Expectations into through the Trough of Disillusionment.

Wozniak echos an important lesson, that IMO, is major part of the reason many of the companies that moved to cloud have experienced lots of outages during the past months. I addressed several of these aspects in in a recent blog post: Lessons from the Heroku/Amazon Outage.

When we move our operations to the cloud, we often assume that we’re out-sourcing our data center operation completely, including our disaster recovery procedures. The truth is that when we move to the cloud we’re only outsourcing the infrastructure, not our operations, and the responsibility of how to use this infrastructure remain ours.

Choosing better tradeoffs between producivity and control

For companies today, the main reason we chose to move to the cloud in the first place was to gain better agility and productivity. But in starting this cloud journey, we found that we had to give up some measure of control to achieve the agility and productivity.

The good news is that as the industry mature there are more choices that provides better tradeoffs between producivity and control:

  • Open source cloud such as OpenStack and CloudStack
  • Private cloud offering
  • DevOps and automation tools such as Chef and Puppet
  • OpenSource PaaS such as Cloudify, OpenShift and CloudFoundry
  • DevOps and PaaS combined such Cloudify

As businesses look at cloud strategy today, there isn’t a need to give up control over productivity. With technologies like Cloudify, businesses can get the best out of both worlds.

References