Oracle (NYSE: ORCL) recently reported its fourth quarter results that failed to impress the market. With industries realigning their digital spends, Oracle is counting on its Autonomous offerings to help drive growth.

Photo credit: Joey Rozier/Flickr.com.

Oracle’s Financials

Revenue for the fourth quarter fell 6% over the year to $10.44 billion, missing analyst estimates of $10.61 billion. Net income was $3.11 billion or $0.99 per share compared with $1.07 per share a year ago. Adjusted EPS was $1.20, compared with $1.16 a year ago. The market was looking for an EPS of $1.15.

Cloud business helped drive Oracle’s revenues, but it failed to offset the decline in hardware sales. Cloud services and license support revenues accounted for 66% of the quarter’s revenues and grew 1% over the year to $6.845 billion. The market was looking for revenues of $6.98 billion from the segment. Within the segment, applications revenues grew 1% to $2.75 billion and Infrastructure revenues came in flat at $4.1 billion.

Cloud license and on-premise license revenues fell 22% over the year to $1.96 billion, also missing the market expectations of $2.11 billion. Hardware revenues also registered a 9% decline to $901 million. Services revenues fell 11% to $735 million.

For fiscal 2020, total revenues declined 1% to $39.1 billion and GAAP net income was $10.1 billion. Cloud services and license support revenues grew 3% to $27.4 billion. Cloud license and on-premise license revenues were $5.1 billion.

Oracle attributed the miss in revenues to the global pandemic which resulted in the slowing down of sales and investment decisions, especially across certain verticals such as airlines and hospitality.

Oracle did not provide a guidance for the current year’s financials. For the first quarter, it expects revenues to grow in the range of (1%)-1% over the year. EPS is expected to be $0.85-$0.89, compared with the Street’s forecast of $0.85 per share.

Oracle’s Autnomous Focus

Despite the pandemic, Oracle is confident of its offerings due to three main reasons. First, it believes that its revenue streams are now clearly in one of three distinct groups: growing, stable, and declining. It realizes that while overall revenue growth appears to be hovering around the 1%-2% range, it is actually being driven by the growing business segments that are delivering 30% plus annual growth rate. As the growing cloud business overtakes the declining businesses of hardware and on-premise offerings, Oracle will begin to see its growth rates improve.

Second, Oracle believes that its SaaS momentum will continue to increase as its large installed base of application customers move to the cloud. It is seeing strong adoption of services like Oracle Fusion that are helping it expand its footprint in the SaaS offerings.

Finally, Oracle is relying on the 4 decades’ worth of its database application experience that is being showcased in the Autonomous Database. Oracle is leveraging its expertise on data security, performance, and cost to make the Autonomous Database the go-to-database offering for customers. It is not also integrating its Autonomous technology in other offerings such as Oracle Autonomous Linux.

By relying on computing technology, autonomous computing systems reduce manual intervention and eliminate human error. Oracle Autonomous Linux is an autonomous operating system that provides 99.995% availability while maintaining itself with continuous security and monitoring, continuous patching, and remediation while the system is running. As more and more OCI services including compute and storage become server-less and elastic, Oracle OCI will have the advantage over competitors by offering its elastic compute and elastic storage that can scale itself up and down automatically while customers are running them.

I think Oracle should look at potential acquisitions to drive growth within its cloud-based services. One such target could be Anaplan that will help it gain market share through its Connected Planning solution. Last year, Workday acquired Adaptive Insights to drive its planning offerings. Oracle’s acquisition of Anaplan will make the market more interesting.

Oracle’s stock is trading at $53.69 with a market capitalization of $169.3 billion. The results left the market a little disappointed and the stock fell 4% in the after-hours trading session. It was trading at a 52-week high of $60.50 in July last year. The stock hit a 52-week low of $39.71 in March this year.