Corporate
The most significant news of the month came as Oracle announced its Fiscal Year 2014 4th quarter and year-end results. Under the headline "Oracle Becomes the Second Largest Cloud SaaS Company in the World", the company announced fiscal 2014 Q4 total revenues that were up 3% to $11.3 billion. Software and Cloud revenues were up 4% to $8.9 billion. Non-GAAP SaaS and PaaS revenues were up 23% to $327 million. In addition, Cloud infrastructure-as-a-service (IaaS) revenues were up 13% to $128 million. New software licenses revenues were unchanged at $3.8 billion. Software license updates and product support revenues were up 7% to $4.7 billion. Overall hardware systems revenues were up 2% to $1.5 billion with hardware systems products up 2% to $870 million, and hardware systems support up 2% to $596 million.
Oracle's continued quest to provide the best solutions to customers around the world was underlined by two acquisitions:
MICROS Systems, Inc, a provider of integrated software and hardware solutions to the Hospitality and Retail industries. Together, Oracle and MICROS will help hotels, food & beverage facilities, and retailers to accelerate innovation, transform their businesses, and delight customers with complete, open and integrated solutions.
LiveLOOK, a leading provider of real-time, visual collaboration technology for co-browsing and screen sharing. LiveLOOK’s cloud-based co-browse technology enables customer service and sales agents to collaborate and visually guide consumers through web and mobile environments to resolve issues effectively and improve the quality of buying decisions. Oracle has over 100 global customers using LiveLOOK’s co-browse technology as an embedded part of Oracle Service Cloud offering.
Oracle Database, Middleware and Technology
The most important product announcement of the month was Oracle Database In-Memory. This delivers leading-edge in-memory performance without the need to restrict functionality or accept compromises, complexity and risk. Deploying Oracle Database In-Memory with virtually any existing Oracle Database-compatible application is as easy as flipping a switch--no application changes are required. It is fully integrated with Oracle Database’s renowned scale-up, scale-out, storage tiering, availability and security technologies making it the most industrial-strength offering in the industry.
The topic of Big Data was the subject of a significant joint announcement by Oracle and one of its major customers in Spain, CaixaBank - a Centre of Excellence in Barcelona to deliver Big Data related services to customers all over Europe. The center will exploit the experience gained in the first phase of implementation of CaixaBank’s new Big Data infrastructure, a project that was initiated in December 2013 and that has been developed with Oracle in record time. According to Juan María Nin, Vice President and CEO of the group, “being one of the first financial institutions in the world in incorporating Big Data in daily business management means a reinforcement of our bet on innovation, one of the strategic lines of CaixaBank."
Another key Technology topic - Services Oriented Architecture, or SOA - was the subject of two related product announcements: Oracle SOA Suite 12c and Oracle Business Process Management (BPM) Suite 12c. With simplified cloud, mobile, on-premises, and Internet of Things (IoT) integration capabilities, all within a single platform, Oracle SOA Suite 12c helps organizations speed time to integration, improve productivity, and lower TCO. The new release of Oracle Business Process Management Suite (Oracle BPM Suite) 12c not only helps businesses optimize and automate their business processes, but it enables them to establish deeper connections that will drive ongoing engagement.
The burgeoning area of Private Cloud saw another Tech announcement from the company. IT organizations are adopting private clouds as a stepping-stone to business-driven, self-service IT. Successful implementations hinge on the ability to efficiently deploy and manage cloud services at enterprise scale. Having a complete cloud management solution integrated with an enterprise-class technology stack is a fundamental requirement for IT. The company announced Oracle Enterprise Manager 12c Release 4 to meet that requirement by helping businesses become more agile and responsive, while reducing cost, complexity, and risk.
Finally in the Tech arena, Oracle has released innovations in Oracle Mobile Suite, which includes the new Oracle Mobile Application Framework (MAF) with an updated version of Oracle Service Bus, These enhancements empower developers to create new, highly scalable, secure mobile applications faster and in an easier way, as part of the Oracle Mobile Platform.
Systems
In support of Oracle Database In-Memory, Oracle announced the latest in its line of workload-specific, enterprise-class servers, the Sun Server X4-4 and Sun Server X4-8. Co-engineered with Oracle software, these servers are the first to include elastic computing features, maximizing performance by adapting to different workload demands in real time. The Sun Server X4-4 is designed specifically for business intelligence and analytics and server consolidation, while the Sun Server X4-8 is the best x86 platform for Oracle Database In-Memory option and scale-up applications. Oracle’s x86 servers are key building blocks for Oracle Engineered Systems.
Oracle announced enhancements to Oracle’s ZFS Storage ZS3 Series. It now provides a fast, efficient way to accelerate virtual machine (VM) deployment and monitoring, while virtually eliminating boot storms. The midrange ZFS Storage ZS3-2 can boot over 16,000 simultaneous VMs in under seven minutes. Also, cloud capabilities have been extended in Oracle ZFS Storage OS 8.2. Supporting these announcements, the company also announced that Oracle ZFS Storage ZS3-2 set a new SPC-2/E world record, demonstrating the best overall price/performance and the most efficient energy use with the highest performance per watt.
Another Oracle Engineered Systems announcement came in the form of Oracle’s next-generation Virtual Compute Appliance. Often, integrating compute, network and storage infrastructure from several vendors, then provisioning and configuring these systems becomes a central impediment to the responsiveness required in today's fast-moving business environment. Oracle’s Virtual Compute Appliance allows companies to streamline these critical tasks with a single, integrated system designed to run virtually any application and support cloud services.
Finally in Systems news, Oracle announced that it is expanding its application-driven software defined networking (SDN) capabilities in Oracle Solaris 11.2 with plans to integrate OpenDaylight SDN. The integration is intended to allow customers to improve service quality and take advantage of apps-to-disk SLAs through compatibility with a wide range of SDN devices, applications and services. It will also allow them to use a common and open SDN platform with OpenStack to manage Oracle Solaris-based clouds. Oracle has joined the OpenDaylight Project as a Silver Member.
Applications
In a cloud-oriented move, Oracle announced that it has extended the simplicity, mobility, and extensibility of the Oracle applications user experience. Available to Oracle Sales Cloud and Oracle HCM Cloud customers, the latest additions enhance productivity and efficiency by further simplifying information access, embedding new visualization and analytic capabilities, and adding new extensibility and customization options. This next evolution of the user experience has been optimized for tablets and smartphones, so user productivity doesn’t slow down when the user is working from a mobile device.
Industries
Helping Communications Service Providers (CSPs), Oracle announced the latest release of Oracle Communications EAGLE Equipment Identity Register, which supports device registration for long-term evolution (LTE) smartphones and other LTE-connected devices and enables CSPs to connect to the Central Equipment Identity Register (CEIR), the global registry of blacklisted devices maintained by the GSMA. Oracle Communications Equipment Identity Register now supports access to the GSMA database via the Diameter protocol and allows CSPs to block LTE devices, building on the product’s earlier support for blocking devices on 2G and 3G networks and accessing the database via the SS7 protocol.
In another Comms industry announcement, Oracle announced Oracle Communications Application Orchestrator, a product to support CSPs in their migration to Network Functions Virtualization (NFV). This enables CSPs to accelerate the convergence of their IT and network domains and bring new services and applications to the marketplace more quickly.
And for the Health Sciences industry, Oracle announced Oracle Health Sciences Data Management Workbench. Using Oracle Health Sciences Data Management Workbench, researchers can integrate, reconcile and analyze clinical data faster and more accurately, which automates data load, transform and cleanse processes. As a result, study sponsors can make faster, more informed decisions that improve control, support adaptive studies and accelerate clinical trials and time to market.
Partners
There was a significant Partner element to the month's main Technology announcement, Oracle Database In-Memory. Its introduction gives ISVs the ability to supercharge their applications to deliver even faster insights, analysis and reporting, while speeding online transaction processing; enabling them to establish a real-time enterprise. Helping ISVs take full advantage of this new offering, Oracle PartnerNetwork’s Oracle Database Ready certification now includes Oracle Database In-Memory.
On June 25th, Oracle welcomed its partners around the globe to the annual Oracle PartnerNetwork (OPN) kickoff, where it provided them with the strategies, insights, and resources they need to succeed and profit with Oracle in the current fiscal year. Hosted by Oracle executives, the live, virtual session unveiled new OPN enablement resources, including new incentive programs, designed to help partners innovate faster, service customers better, differentiate themselves in the market and grow their businesses with Oracle. During the kick-off, the company announced that Oracle PartnerNetwork (OPN) is extending its Oracle Exastack program to give partners the opportunity to achieve Oracle Exastack Ready or Optimized status for Oracle Big Data Appliance and Oracle Database Appliance.
For a replay of the event, visit http://bit.ly/1pgDjXL
About Oracle
Oracle engineers hardware and software to work together in the cloud and in your data center. For more information about Oracle (NASDAQ:ORCL), visit www.oracle.com.
Further Information
For more news and information about Oracle, contact your local Oracle PR manager or visit http://emeapressoffice.oracle.com