Oracle, looks like your revenues were down. 'Cloud! Cloud! Look at the cloud!'

Hurd n' Catz blame dollar, talk up cloud numbers… again

Oracle is pointing to continued growth for its cloud business as the bright side in a quarter that saw the enterprise giant drop revenues slightly, but still top Wall Street expectations.

Big Red's fiscal 2016 Q2 numbers ending November 30 were as follows:

• Total revenues were $8.9bn, down 6 per cent from the $9.5bn haul over the same period last year.
• Net income of $2.19bn was down 12 per cent year-over-year from $2.5bn.
• Earnings per share of $0.63 came in ahead of analyst estimates of $0.60 per share on the previous year's quarter.
• Cloud revenues were $649m, an increase of 26 per cent over last year's quarter.
• On-premise software revenues of $6.36bn were down 7 per cent from the year-ago quarter.
• Hardware revenue was $1.12bn, a decrease of 16 per cent from the year-ago quarter.

As with previous quarters, Oracle co-CEOs Mark Hurd and Safra Catz, along with CTO and chairman Larry Ellison, looked to downplay the drop in its on-premise revenues and talk up the continued growth of its cloud business.

"We are still on-target to sell and book more than $1.5bn of new SaaS and PaaS business this fiscal year," Ellison boasted.

"That is considerably more SaaS and PaaS new business than any other cloud services provider including Salesforce.com."

The execs also suggested that a "strong headwind" from the dollar exchange rate was hurting the company's bottom line and helping to further the revenue drops.

Oracle said that it will be shaking things up with the introduction of a new member to its board of directors. Former Intel president Renee James has been unanimously elected and will take her spot on the board immediately.

"She will bring a unique perspective and tremendous depth of experience and knowledge of the technology industry to our board," Ellison said of the appointment.

James will grow Oracle's board of directors to 13 members. ®