back to article Oracle: Our figures say hardware has flatlined, but we assure you it hasn't

Database and wannabe hardware giant Oracle has beat Wall Street expectations after nine disappointing months, and said cloud services are one of its three main growth areas for next year. The company reported its second-quarter results for its fiscal 2014 year on Wednesday, and surprised analysts by stemming the rot in new …

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  1. Nate Amsden

    so...

    they're getting out of commodity hardware, and into commodity cloud?

    seems kind of stupid.. would of thought they would of gotten out of anything commodity. No margins after all.

    1. Anonymous Coward
      Anonymous Coward

      Re: so...

      The Boat Anchor business that Oracle have specialised in is dying. The vast majority of 'midrange' systems that used to require expensive hardware and software are being replaced with commodity Wintel solutions....

      1. Nate Amsden

        Re: so...

        They don't seem to believe that given their engineered solutions.

        If they did then they would not be rapidly exiting the commodity server business.

        They want high margin, they don't care about selling a million boxes if it's at a tiny margin rate (IBM is similar I think hence rumors of them wanting to sell some/most of their X-series x86 systems to someone).

        I suppose the only explanation is the "commodity" cloud has much higher margins than the term "commodity" indicates. Given your typical cloud pricing from Amazon or whomever it doesn't surprise me so much. But the use of the word commodity was somewhat surprising.

  2. Joe Pankow

    uh

    price competitive with amazon? all the best to larry and the rest of the team. someone compared this with automaker consolidation in the early 20th century.

    1. Richard 26

      Re: uh

      "price competitive with amazon?"

      Until you're hooked, and find your business depending on proprietary Oracle software running in their cloud...

  3. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    Disappointing article in pure journalistic terms, this reads more like a political pamplet than a news article. Not what I'd expect from El Reg. Very poor mix of news reporting, poor analysis and biased opinion.

    Knock and criticise Oracle all you want but when you don't comment on significant events such as Cisco's profit warning and resultant 13% drop in share price last month you're missing the point.

    The financial markets look to Oracle as a bellwether of the health of the IT industry, and were substantially relieved at Oracle's results - hence the 1.4% shareprice rise in after hours trading. That was the news.

    Also, compared to IBM (down 16 percent, adjusting for currency) and Cisco (8-10 percent drop in revenue in the current quarter), Oracle's hardware 2% growth in constant currency looks decidedly rosy.

    1. Destroy All Monsters Silver badge

      Analysts will analyze, film at 11

      > Cisco ... you're missing the point.

      What is the point?

      > The financial markets look to Oracle as a bellwether of the health of the IT industry

      The "financial markets" are made up of clowns that need to clown lest the music stops.

      For me all this just means that in an bubble atmosphere of the worst sort anything can happen and random interpretations can be pulled out of random arses.

      We also may have Oracle cannibalizing its own customer base for a last hurrah but this is yet another problem.

  4. Loverofpies

    The article seems harsh

    People like to knock big companies like Oracle. Personally I've been impressed with the engineered hardware. Combining exadata and exalytics produces a db and epm platform that is one of the best around for a large business

  5. Trevor_Pott Gold badge

    Screw Oracle

    and the boat they sank on the way in.

  6. bep

    No comments on the tortured headline?

    'It's' is an abbreviation for 'it is'. I don't know what that headline is, but it aint' English, pardner.

    1. Richard 26
      Headmaster

      Re: No comments on the tortured headline?

      "a contraction of it is or it has", says my dictionary.

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