Oracle Q1 2021-2 results: Cloud revenue reaches a quarter

Oracle has announced a 4% increase in year-on-year first-quarter results for its fiscal year 2021-2. The supplier declared $9.7bn revenue for the quarter.

Safra Catz, CEO at Oracle, said: “Oracle’s two new cloud businesses, IaaS and SaaS [infrastructure and software as a service], are now over 25% of our total revenue with an annual run rate of $10bn. Taken together, IaaS and SaaS are Oracle’s fastest-growing and highest-margin new businesses.”

Oracle chairman and CTO Larry Ellison added: “Oracle is delivering some truly innovative infrastructure services. Last quarter, we released the next generation of the world’s most popular open source database, MySQL, which now includes the HeatWave in-memory query accelerator, and the AutoPilot management tools.

“Many customers measured our new MySQL cloud service to be much faster, less expensive and easier to use than SnowFlake, [Amazon] Aurora, [Amazon] RedShift and other commonly used cloud databases. In response to requests from some of those customers, we decided to make MySQL HeatWave available on other clouds in addition to the Oracle Cloud.”

Cloud services and licence support revenues were reported as up 6% to $7.4bn. Cloud licence and on-premise licence revenues were down 8% to $813m. 

Deutsche Bank is among the EMEA customers the supplier is highlighting alongside the results statement. The bank has agreed to a multi-year collaboration with Oracle to modernise its database technology. The agreement will see Deutsche Bank upgrade its existing database systems and migrate the bulk of its Oracle Database estate to Oracle Exadata Cloud@Customer to support applications that either will not move to the public cloud or may do so in the future.

Stockholm-headquartered construction firm Skanska went live in April 2021 with Oracle Fusion Cloud ERP (enterprise resource planning) and HCM (human capital management).

And in the Middle East, Qatar Airways has chosen Oracle Fusion Cloud EPM (enterprise performance management) to reduce financial planning time, while Saudi Arabia’s efforts to build an entirely new, sustainable city, Neom, will feature the implementation of an Oracle Dedicated Region Cloud@Customer to power a range of smart-city technologies. Neom will boast the world’s largest coral garden, in the Red Sea.

In the release statement, Ellison urged industry watchers to read a recent article, summarising a forthcoming Gartner report, in Cloud Wars: “Oracle leapfrogs Google in major cloud ranking”.

Ellison has been on a steady warpath against public cloud providers in recent years. AWS has been centrally in his sights, and he is now targeting GCP.

In the table linked though to in the Cloud Wars article, by Bob Evans, Oracle is ranked sixth, with Microsoft, Amazon and Google occupying positions one to three.

In the financial analyst call connected with the earnings release, transcribed by the SeekingAlpha financial news site, Ellison said: “We plan to make Oracle MySQL with HeatWave available on other public clouds in addition to the Oracle Public Cloud and compete aggressively where we have huge technical advantages over Amazon Aurora, Amazon RedShift and, perhaps most interestingly, huge technical advantages, performance and cost over SnowFlake.”

Earlier in 2021, Ellison was gunning for SAP on the business applications side of the enterprise software competitive environment, claiming that the German supplier had failed to rewrite its ERP products for the cloud, but had rather done so for SAP’s Hana database. “SAP really is more responsible for our leadership position than we are,” he said, during the financial analyst call for Oracle’s Q3 2020-21 results in March.