Grey clouds form over Oracle after results miss

Wall Street less than impressed with Oracle's growth as cloud numbers remain hidden

Oracle's share price dropped over five per cent in after-hours trading after its Q1 cloud numbers failed to impress Wall Street.

The vendor changed its reporting method in Q4, meaning it no longer breaks out figures for its specific cloud units.

Instead, the vendor groups its on-prem and cloud businesses into two new units: cloud services and licence support; and cloud licences and on-premise licences.

The first category saw revenue increase three per cent year on year to $6.6bn (£5bn), while the second saw revenue decline three per cent to $867m.

Overall revenue climbed one per cent to $9.2bn.

When questioned about the weak performance by an analyst on an earnings call, transcribed by Seeking Alpha, Oracle's co-CEO Safra Katz attributed the weaker-than-expected results to currency fluctuations.

The vendor has been criticised for its new reporting method, with some analysts claiming it may have made the change to mask slow growth in its cloud businesses.

Oracle however claimed that the new style is a more accurate reflection of the business because of its Bring Your Own Licence model - which lets customer move their on-prem licences to the public cloud.

Oracle founder Larry Ellison was however bullish on the earnings call, claiming that the vendor's database will drive its other cloud businesses.

"The Oracle database is so much better than other databases; even our biggest competitors use it to run their businesses," he said.

"Salesforce.com uses Oracle to run their sales automation cloud, SAP uses the Oracle database to run their cloud services and nearly all their on-premise customers; even Amazon uses the Oracle database to run most of their business."

Oracle recently announced that president Thomas Kurian would be taking a period of extended leave, with some reports claiming that he had fallen out with Ellison over Oracle's cloud strategy.

Ellison, as he has done so often in the past, took aim at Amazon specifically when discussing the vendor's results.

Earlier this year reports suggested that Amazon was planning to stop using Oracle's database in favour of its own, but Oracle disputed these claims.

"Now that the Oracle Autonomous Database is running in our second-generation bare metal cloud infrastructure, customers can both lower their labour costs and cut their Amazon bill in half by running the Oracle database on Oracle cloud infrastructure," Ellison claimed.

"The Oracle Autonomous Database automatically catches itself while running; it prevents data theft.

"No other database can do that. We think these are compelling advantages with the Amazon infrastructure business. We think these compelling advantages will allow us to compete very effectively against Amazon in the infrastructure business.

"Today, we may be behind Amazon in infrastructure market share, but we are way ahead of Amazon in cloud infrastructure technology. We think that will allow us to gain market share in infrastructure in the cloud very, very rapidly."

In the two other areas of Oracle's business (along with the two units mentioned above) the vendor saw hardware sales decline four per cent year on year to £904m, while revenue from services dropped five per cent to £813m.

TechMarketView analyst Angela Eager said: "Even with the new reporting structure, the inference is that cloud growth has shortened its stride.

"In the year-ago quarter, total cloud revenue reached $1.5bn which was a 51 per cent rise over the previous year…

"That put cloud revenue at [around] 16 per cent of total revenue and contributed to overall revenue growth of seven per cent. Looking at the one per cent total revenue growth in Q119, we can surmise that the rate of cloud growth has plateaued as on-premise sales continue to fall.

"Another concern is a class-action lawsuit against Oracle relating to allegations over its cloud sales."