Fly Intel: What to watch for in Oracle's earnings report

Oracle (ORCL) is scheduled to report results of its first fiscal quarter after the market close on September 17, with a conference call scheduled for 5:00 pm ET. What to watch for: 1. Q CONSENSUS DOWN A TICK: Along with its last report, Oracle guided for Q1 adjusted earnings per share of 67c-69c, or 68c-70c in constant currency. At the time, analysts expected the company to reported Q1 EPS of 72c, but that figure has since fallen to 69c. 2. FY19 GUIDANCE: In addition, Oracle co-chief executive officer Safra Catz said in the company's previous earnings report that she expects revenue growth in fiscal 2019 to enable the company to delivery double-digit adjusted EPS growth once again. Adding to the forward looking view, co-CEO Mark Hurd said that he expects continued strong growth from the company's Fusion SaaS suites throughout FY19. Larry Ellison, chairman and chief technology officer, added at the time that he thinks large scale migrations of Oracle database to the cloud will drive its PaaS and IaaS businesses throughout FY19. 3. PENTAGON CLOUD DEAL: Bloomberg reported on June 26 that there was a large coalition of companies seeking to keep a Pentagon cloud-computing contract from going exclusively to Amazon (AMZN), with Oracle, Microsoft (MSFT), and IBM (IBM) reportedly as the most active members of the group. On August 7, Reuters reported, citing a statement from a company spokeswoman, that Oracle had filed a protest with the U.S. Government Accountability Office, saying the cloud computing deal that the Pentagon opened up its bidding for with estimated value of up to $10B should not go to a single company. Oracle argued that under the award, the Pentagon would be locked in a contract with a legacy cloud provider for as long as a decade, and that approach is "contrary to industry's multi-cloud strategy." 4. AMAZON MOVING OFF ORACLE: On August 1, CNBC reported that Amazon, which has been moving off Oracle software for several years, intends to complete the transition by the first quarter of 2020. A week later, Oracle co-founder Larry Ellison said that it would be difficult for Amazon to rely exclusively on its own database technologies, according to CNBC. "They've got a goal to get off by 2020," Ellison said. "Salesforce (CRM) couldn't do it. SAP (SAP) couldn't do it. I don't think they can do it. We'll see...They think of themselves as a competitor, so it's kind of embarrassing when Amazon uses Oracle. They've had 10 years to get off Oracle and they're still on Oracle. It's not going to be easy to use their own tech. It's not going to be cost-effective."