Oracle (ORCL) is scheduled to report results of its second fiscal quarter after the market close on December 17, with a conference call scheduled for 5:00 pm ET. What to watch for:
1. Q2 EPS VIEW DOWN A TICK: Along with its last report, Oracle guided for Q2 adjusted earnings per share of 77c-79c in U.S. dollars on revenue growth of 0%-2%. The company also guided for Q2 adjusted EPS of 78c-80c in constant currency. At the time, analysts were expecting Oracle to report Q2 EPS of 79c on revenue of $9.84B, but those figures have since changed to 78c and $9.52B, respectively.
2. CLOUD REVENUE: In its last report, Oracle reported first quarter Cloud Services and License Support plus Cloud License and On-Premise License revenues of $7.5B, up 2% year-over-year, and Cloud Services and License Support revenues of $6.6B. At the time, co-CEO Mark Hurd said, "The vast majority of ERP applications running in the cloud are either Oracle Fusion or Oracle NetSuite systems. In the first quarter, we increased our market share as customers continued to buy Oracle Fusion ERP to replace their existing SAP and Workday ERP systems. The Oracle Fusion ERP customer count is now nearly 5,500, while the NetSuite ERP customer count is over 15,000. Virtually every analyst ranks Oracle as the market leader in cloud ERP."
3. AWS OFF ORACLE BY YEAR END 2019: Late last month, Amazon Web Services (AMZN) CEO Andy Jassy told CNBC's Jon Fortt that Amazon will be off all of Oracle's databases by the end of 2019 or mid-2019. The ecommerce giant is using its own services and cutting down on its reliance on Oracle for its data needs, and Jassy said at the time that 88% of Amazon databases that were running on Oracle will instead run on Amazon DynamoDB or Amazon Aurora by the end of this year.
4. PENTAGON CLOUD CONTRACT: TechCrunch reported last Thursday that Oracle has filed a lawsuit in the U.S. Court of Federal Claims alleging once again that the single-vendor award $10B Pentagon JEDI contract is unfair and violates federal procurement law. The company, which has complained that the deal has been written to favor Amazon Web Services, made a similar argument to the Government Accountability Office, which ruled against Oracle and also rejected IBM's (IBM) challenge as well.
5. M&A: Oracle was somewhat active in mergers and acquisitions over the past quarter, starting with its announcement in mid-October that it agreed to acquire goBalto, which delivers cloud solutions to accelerate clinical trials by streamlining and automating the selection and set up of the "best performing" clinical research sites to conduct trials. Terms of that pact were not disclosed. A week later, Oracle said it signed a deal to acquire DataFox, whose "cloud-based artificial intelligence data engine and derived business content provide the most current, precise and expansive set of company-level information and insightful data to optimize business decisions." Terms of the DataFox deal also were not disclosed.
Oracle
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Amazon.com
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IBM
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