Software and systems vendor Oracle saw hardware sales plummet once again in its latest quarter. Hardware product sales fell 16% to $869 million in the three months ending February 29th, with hardware support fees falling 4%.
The company’s total revenues rose by just 3% for the quarter, up to $9.0 billion. Revenues from its core software business increased 8% to $6.4 billion.
Behind the decline in hardware sales lies a move away from the legacy, commodity hardware business that Oracle bought as part of its Sun Microsystems acquisition, towards the new higher-cost, higher-margin ‘engineered systems’ range, which combines Sun hardware and Oracle software in pre-integrated ‘stacks’.
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Oracle co-president Mark Hurd said in a statment that revenue from these engineered systems, such as Exalytics and Exadata, had risen 139% in the latest quarter.
On a conference call with investment analysts, Oracle CEO Larry Ellison made some characteristically combative remarks about the company’s opposition.
"We named our cloud the Oracle Secure Cloud because we believe that we’ve addressed our customers’ most serious concern about cloud computing, namely security," he said. "Salesforce.com does not offer this kind of security in their cloud."
He also commented on arch-rival vendor SAP’s HANA in memory database platform, which the German company says offers its customers an alternative to using Oracle’s database software to support their business intelligence systems and, in future, their applications.
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"When SAP… said they’re going to build this in-memory database system and compete with Oracle, I said, duh, get me the name of that pharmacist, they must be on drugs," he said. "I don’t believe SAP is equipped to compete with us in a database business when we’ve been working on [an in-memory database] for 10 years."
