Larry Ellison (Oracle)
A revenue surge stemming from Oracle’s cloud services and licence support has helped to bolster the software giant’s financials in a second quarter that saw it weather falls in cloud licence and on-premise licence revenues.
The three months ending 30 November saw Oracle post a 4 per cent year-on-year increase in cloud services and licence support revenues, to US$7.1 billion.
At the same time, the company revealed a 3 per cent year-on-year fall in cloud licence and on-premise licence revenues, to US$1.1 billion. Total quarterly revenues, meanwhile, were up by 2 per cent, year-over-year, to US$9.8 billion.
One particularly bright spot within Oracle’s portfolio was its Gen2 Cloud Infrastructure and Autonomous Database operations, which delivered revenue increases of over 100 per cent.
"Oracle's Gen2 Cloud Infrastructure is adding customers and growing revenue at a rate well in excess of 100 per cent per year," Oracle chairman and CTO Larry Ellison said. "Demand for our Gen2 Cloud Infrastructure is exceeding our plan and we are opening new data centres as fast as we can.
“Oracle opened 13 additional regional data centres in 2020 to bring our total to 29 regional data centres worldwide, more than AWS [Amazon Web Services],” he added, comparing his company’s performance in the hotly-contested data centre space with its long-time foe.
It should be noted that, at the time of writing, the latest tally by AWS claimed that its global cloud infrastructure footprint featured 24 launched regions and 77 availability zones servicing 245 countries and territories.
But AWS doesn't necessarily count its individual data centres and its data centre regions in the same way as Oracle. Rather, an AWS region is a physical location around the world where the company clusters its data centres.
Each AWS region consists of multiple, isolated and physically separate availability zones within a geographic area, unlike many other cloud providers, which often define a region as a single data centre. Regardless, Oracle now expects to have 38 cloud regions live by mid-2021, with the recent opening of three new commercial cloud regions, one in Dubai, one in the United Kingdom and one in Chile.
While Oracle’s cloud infrastructure offering appears to be coming along at a fair clip, the company’s Fusion Cloud ERP business also saw growth, resulting in a 33 per cent increase in revenue, while its NetSuite Cloud ERP revenue was also up by 21 per cent.
"Our highly profitable multi-billion dollar Fusion and NetSuite Cloud ERP applications businesses grew revenue 33 per cent and 21 per cent respectively in Q2," said Oracle CEO Safra Catz.
"These two strategic cloud applications businesses are major contributors to Oracle's increased operating earnings and consistent earnings per share growth. We expect this rapid market share and revenue growth trend to continue as both Gartner and IDC rank Oracle's ERP suite number one in the cloud,” she added.
One of the noted wins for the company during the quarter included data centre operator Equinix, which plans to implement Oracle Fusion Cloud ERP, EPM, and CX to replace its Oracle E-Business Suite applications.
