Oracle's first-quarter results are in, with figures that slightly disappointed Wall Street. But as usual, the accompanying earnings conference call provided a number of nuggets that should be of greater interest to customers, partners and competitors than the pure numbers. Here's a look at the highlights.
IaaS at OpenWorld: Oracle CEO Larry Ellison revealed what could be the main new product announcement at next week's OpenWorld conference: A second-generation version of Oracle's IaaS (infrastructure as a service) that he portrayed as a game-changer in that highly competitive market:
We’re very excited about the rollout of our Generation2 infrastructure as a service data centers. These new data centers give us a significant cost and performance advantage over Amazon Web Services. Plus, our new bare metal offering makes it possible for our customers to lift and shift their entire existing corporate infrastructure, data and applications without any changes whatsoever and move it to the Oracle Public Cloud. You just can’t do that with Amazon Web Services.
The new IaaS delivers twice the compute, twice the memory, four times as much storage and ten times as much throughput for 20 percent less money than AWS, Oracle says. While that may be the case, Oracle has a massive mountain to climb with IaaS. It logged $171 million in IaaS revenue for the quarter, a rise of 7 percent. In contrast, Amazon reported $2.89 billion in revenue for AWS in its most recent quarter, a rise of 58 percent year over year.
Oracle Database to Go 'Cloud-First': The strongest piece of symbolism demonstrating Oracle's shift to a cloud business model came in June, when it emerged that Oracle Database 12.2 will first be released on Oracle's cloud service and won't immediately be made available for on-premises deployments. Version 12.2 will be showcased at OpenWorld, and nothing was said on the call to suggest Oracle's plans have changed. As CEO Mark Hurd put it:
We are announcing the latest version of our database, and it’s going to be available in the cloud, on Exadata. We think—I think you’re going to see a very rapid update of the new version. And we expect those customers to consume some of it on-prem, but also a significant amount of their new database consumption is going to be in the cloud.
So I think 12.2 is going to move customers to the cloud more quickly than they otherwise might.
Not Much News on NetSuite: Oracle's pending $9.3 billion acquisition of NetSuite will pump up its cloud results if and when it goes through. It has received antitrust clearance everywhere but the United States, where the waiting period runs through September, CEO Safra Catz said on the call. Nothing was mentioned about the opposition to the deal by NetSuite's second-largest shareholder after Ellison, T. Rowe Price & Associates, which says Ellison has a conflict of interest. That opposition forced NetSuite to consider any better offers that come in, although it can't solicit any.
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