Oracle results: Revenue flat, cloud progress claimed

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.”