back to article Oracle shares pummeled after giant reports glacial growth

Oracle's shares dropped sharply after the database giant reported results that – yet again – missed analysts' expectations. Ellison & Co. reported revenues of $11.32bn and an earnings-per-share (EPS) of $0.92 for its fourth financial quarter of 2014 on Thursday, missing analyst expectations of $11.48bn and an EPS of $0.95. …

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  1. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    "...indicating trouble in acquiring new customers"

    "Now then Mr Customer, why don't you place you balls in our lovely corporate vice?"

    "Smithers, why are they going elsewhere?"

    1. Anonymous Coward
      Anonymous Coward

      Re: "...indicating trouble in acquiring new customers"

      This is spot-on. As a fairly large company, we started to evade Oracle wherever technically and operationally possible, even Microsoft starts looking better at the moment and this is no mean feat. Exactly for the reason you so eloquently put. We start to feel the pressure ...down there.

    2. Anonymous Coward
      Anonymous Coward

      Re: "...indicating trouble in acquiring new customers"

      Yep - their boat anchor buisness is being wiped off the map by high end Wintel servers, and their database business is being slowly destroyed by SQL server. Their long standing screwing of their locked in customers for support costs can only add to the mass exodus...

  2. Yet Another Anonymous coward Silver badge

    SaaS, PaaS

    Are supposed to allow you escape from being locked to expensive propriety server applications and databases - so you naturally go with the main jailer?

    1. Paul Crawford Silver badge

      Re: SaaS, PaaS

      Nope, all of the [X]aaS models are about locking you in to a steady revenue.

      Unless you are too small to make having an IT support person worth it, or have such a variable service demand that buying peak-demand is too expensive, then just avoid it!

      1. Charles Manning

        Re: SaaS, PaaS

        "Unless you are too small to make having an IT support person"

        Small business is the only growth area in USA. Small businesses cannot generally afford BOFHs and hence the cloud-based solutions are very appealing.

        They might lock you in, but at least they're available. Even people that can do their own BOFHery are using cloud because it is cheaper than doing it yourself.

        Some collegues of mine (small company of sub-20 employees) use Amazon VMs when they need some grunt. Why? It is cheaper than buying and maintaining your own.

  3. Charles Manning

    So where was the growth supposed to come from?

    Oracle sells to corporations, mainly US ones.

    Corporate USA (and even corps globally) are generally on the ropes. They are not spending up huge, especially on expensive infrastructure.

    No corporate growth --> no corporate IT spend up --> no growth for companies feeding on that.

    Where these is some growth in USA is in small businesses. Most of those are going for new cloudy brands for their accounting services etc. They are not installing big iron or using big-iron-think database systems.

    1. foxyshadis

      Re: So where was the growth supposed to come from?

      I think you're looking at the wrong year -- US corporate spending is finally opening up in a big way this year, after trickling up for the past couple years. It's mainly Oracle who isn't benefiting from all of this, from the looks of it.

  4. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    Very little

    Oracle expects to ship its 10,000th unit of Engineered Systems during the current quarter...compared with Hewlett Packard that sells near 200,000th servers in the world for trimester, the oracle figure seems very little.

    1. Anonymous Coward
      Anonymous Coward

      Re: Very little

      Not so little if you consider that Oracle a) not in a business of commodity hardware and b) every one of these 10,000 units cost around million upfront and another million every year in licensing.

      1. luis river

        Fatal comment

        If Oracle sold 10.000 sistems to 1 million each one, total serious sales 10.000 millions $ annual, when in fact alone sells some hundreds of millions $ annual

  5. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    "Missing analyst expectations"

    Only in the financial crystal ball business is any divergence between forecast and reality considered to be the fault of the company rather than the forecaster.

    "Analysts were incorrect" is what this really means, but repeating this too often might cause people to lose confidence in them. (Though thinking about it the Jehovah's Witnesses have predicted the end of the world about six times now, and they are still coming round trying to give out the Watchtower.)

    1. Gordon 10

      Re: "Missing analyst expectations"

      true - and in most cases I would agree with you - but with flat revenues against the background of an improving market - the ANALysts might just have a point this time.

  6. ForthIsNotDead

    Not surprised.

    IMO I would say that unless you are dealing with absolutely ginormous databases, there are (now) plenty of other alternative systems out there that are *good enough to get the job done*.

    A lot of them are free.

    Open source gonna eat your lunch, Oracle.

  7. Beachrider

    Oracle is sometimes inflexible on privacy...

    In the USA, there are 'HIPAA' privacy rules, particularly surrounding healthcare information. The big prosecutors in the USA have been quite active prosecuting violations of 'protected health information'.

    Caregivers don't want to pay for violations done by their business-partners, so they get agreements from partners to pay the fines IF the partner is the cause.

    In my state, Caregivers are sharing that Oracle is not signing such agreements. This is making it easier to choose vendors (or transition to vendors) that sign these agreements.

    It is not good for Oracle growth in the Caregiver sector of the economy.

  8. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    I guess they have a bad reputation now that they killed all FOSS stuff they got when they bought Sun ... FOSS crowd is now looking elsewhere, as they did with SCO, and Novell/Suse - and big companies have freetard^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^Hcompetent staff in server rooms. They are even actively killing off Solaris....

    That and the price hikes (licenses), bad economic situation of big corps ... sad, really, their db is top of the range when you are talking big, critical db.

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