Oracle Cloud Slightly Cloudy

Oracle (NYSE: ORCL) has had a rough few months recently. While the company continues to surpass market expectations on earnings, its revenues are a matter of concern for the Street. Above all, analysts remain concerned about its slowing growth within the Cloud revenues.

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Oracle’s Financials

Revenue for the first quarter grew 1% over the year to $9.19 billion, falling short of the Street’s forecast of $9.28 billion. EPS of $0.71 was ahead of the market’s forecast of $0.69. This was the second consecutive quarter that Oracle missed on its revenue expectations.

Starting this fiscal, Oracle has redefined the segments it reports its revenues. Under the new segments, Oracle will no longer report the revenues it is getting from its Cloud infrastructure and platform services.

Cloud services and license support revenues grew 3% over the year to $6.61 billion and brought in majority of its revenues. The market was looking for revenues of $6.68 billion for the quarter. The cloud license and on-premises license revenues came in at $867 million, marginally ahead of the consensus of $865 million. Hardware revenues came in at $904 million, and services revenues were $813 million for the quarter.

For the current quarter, Oracle expects to deliver $0.77-$0.79 in earnings per share, compared with the Street’s forecast of $0.79 per share. Oracle is targeting to end the quarter with revenues growing between 0%-2% over the year.

Oracle’s Cloud

For the past few months, Oracle’s concerns have been around its Cloud strategy. Matters appear to have caused concern within the company, as executive Thomas Kurian reportedly went on an extended leave from the organization. Kurian has led the product development for Oracle and is spearheading its cloud efforts. The abrupt announcement of his leave was supposedly triggered by a disagreement with Chairman Larry Ellison on the cloud strategy.

Kurian wants to make more of Oracle’s software available on public clouds operated by vendors like Amazon and Microsoft. But that is a move that Larry is not comfortable with. Moving more of their products to the cloud would help Oracle expand its market reach faster and leverage the strengths of the cloud service providers. But Oracle has always been very critical about the quality of some of these public clouds and is not willing to give in. Oracle’s management maintains that Kurian will be back at work soon.

What do you think? Would it make sense to have Oracle deliver its products over AWS? Or, do you think it makes sense for Oracle to keep it all in-house?

Meanwhile, Oracle remains committed to its desire to grow its cloud footprint. It is looking to quadruple the number of its largest data centers during the current year. Till now, investment in the area has been modest. Since 2014, Oracle has invested $3.4 billion in the development of data centers.

Its stock is currently trading at $50.43 with a market capitalization of $200.77 billion. It touched a 52-week high of $53.48 in March this year. It has recovered from the year low of $42.57 that it had fallen to in June this year.

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