Oracle’s Focus on Application Platforms Paying Off

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Oracle?(NYSE: ORCL) recently reported its second quarter results that surpassed market expectations. It remains focused on its platform to allow developers to expand their offerings.

Oracle’s Financials

Revenue for the second quarter grew 25% to $12.3 billion, ahead of analyst estimates of $12.04 billion. Net income was $1.7 billion or $0.63 per share compared with a loss of $0.46 per share a year ago. Adjusted EPS was $1.21. The market was looking for an EPS of $1.17.

Cloud services and license support revenues accounted for 70% of the quarter’s revenues and grew 20% to $8.598 billion. Cloud license and on-premise license revenues grew 23% to $1.435 billion. Hardware revenues also registered a 16% growth to $850 million. Services revenues grew 83% to $1.393 billion.

Cloud growth remained the main growth driver delivering 27% growth primarily due to 23% increase in cloud license and on-premise license segment revenue.

Oracle’s Platform Focus

Recently,?Oracle?announced its partnership with NVIDIA to bring the full NVIDIA accelerated computing stack to?Oracle?Cloud Infrastructure (OCI). The partnership will provide enterprises with a broad, easily accessible portfolio of options for AI training and deep learning inference at scale.

Oracle remained focused on expanding its platform offerings. Oracle Applications Platform enables organizations to leverage Oracle’s Redwood UX components that offer advanced technologies such as search, self-learning recommendations, and conversational experiences as well as telemetry and low-code development tools, to quickly and easily deliver secure apps that complement and seamlessly integrate with Oracle’s complete suite of cloud applications.

The Oracle Applications Platform provides capabilities including UX building blocks that enable enterprise developers to assemble and modify the UX components without lengthy software development projects. Its components for application telemetry help enterprise developers benefit from real-world feedback on their apps to quickly resolve issues and inform further improvements.

Oracle’s search component also enables enterprise developers to quickly and easily integrate powerful, self-tuning search capabilities in their apps and preserve learned suggestions across devices. It is a self-learning recommendation engine that is integrated with Redwood components and helps enterprise developers increase the productivity of end users without any additional coding. It also provided advanced analytics components that enable enterprise developers to embed data visualizations within their Redwood apps.

Oracle is already seeing strong adoption of its Back Office Cloud Apps. Back Office Cloud Apps have an ARR of $5.1 billion. Fusion HCM/ERP apps have a combined customer base of over 10,000.

Oracle’s stellar performance was especially important given the current economic uncertainty. Its last year’s acquisition of Cerner has also helped it tremendously as the entity contributed $1.5 billion to the total revenue. Cerner’s electronic health record (EHR) capabilities have helped Oracle improve it’s healthcare-focused offerings. Oracle is looking to leverage the acquisition by continuing to improve its technology to modernize healthcare information systems. It wants to fully automate clinical trials to shorten the time it takes to deliver lifesaving new drugs to patients, enable doctors to easily access better information leading to better patient outcomes, and provide public health professionals with an early warning system that locates and identifies new pathogens in time to prevent the next pandemic. Healthcare technology is a fast growing space with tech giants including the likes of Google investing in technology solutions for healthcare such as the Google Cloud Healthcare Data Engine.

Oracle’s stock is trading at $83.72 with a market capitalization of $225.7 billion. It was trading at a 52-week high of $89.58 in January last year. The stock hit a 52-week low of $60.78 in October last year.

Disclosure:?All investors should make their own assessments based on their own research, informed interpretations, and risk appetite. This article expresses my own opinions based on my own research of product-market fit, channel execution, and other factors. My primary interest is in product strategy. While this may have bearing on stock movements, my writings tend to focus on long-term implications. The information presented is illustrative and educational, but should not be regarded as a complete analysis nor recommendation to buy or sell the securities mentioned herein. I am not a registered investment adviser and I am not receiving compensation for this article. I am an investor in this company.

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