Will Oracle Cut Deals to Boost Earnings?

A head of a consulting firm that helps Oracle customers cut licensing deals with the enterprise software giant said Friday that fallout around Oracle's recent earnings announcement could help clients out at the bargaining table.

"If Oracle is posting fantastic numbers and growth, they tend to play hardball," said Ed Ramirez, president of Software Licensing Consultants, a San Ramon, California, firm. "If earnings are weak, perception is weak, that's good for end users and customers."

Oracle said Wednesday that its third-quarter revenues were up 21 percent to US$5.3 billion compared to the same quarter last year. On the surface, the numbers looked strong, especially in light of the widespread malaise in the U.S. economy, but Oracle still fell slightly short of analysts' estimates and its stock dropped in subsequent days this week.

But Eliot Arlo Colon, president and chief operating officer of Miro Consulting, an Oracle license consulting firm in Fords, New Jersey, didn't go quite as far as Ramirez. "It provides notice to clients that there's a weakness with Oracle," he said. "It gets them excited that maybe there's a possibility for a bigger discount. I don't know if that will play to getting huge concessions from them. It's still a case-by-case basis."

For its part, Oracle downplayed the results and said investors could expect a stronger fourth quarter. During a conference call Wednesday, the company president, Charles Phillips, said "a lot of people have annual buying cycles around our Q4. Customers think they're going to get a better deal if they wait until Q4."

But will they? The answer isn't clear-cut, according to Ramirez and Colon.
For example, while there might be a rush of discounting at the end of the fiscal year, it's difficult to predict how much, Ramirez said: "Everything is triggered by sales people not hitting their quota. In turn, their management doesn't hit their number. That is what triggers it -- it's not necessarily that Oracle as a corporation says, 'We need to do this.' It's a trickle-up effect."

Ramirez, who worked as an area sales manager at Oracle, added that the company can make concessions to customers beyond discounts, such as on various terms and conditions.

Colon offered a different caution, saying that there's far more competition for discounts during such rush periods.

"It's becoming more public that Oracle only has so much bandwidth to process larger deals at the end of the year. The message coming from Oracle field reps now is, 'Don't wait until the end of May, because I won't be able to get you the aggressive discounts.'"

"Once one big deal closes, a sales team may have hit their number and [other customers] get kicked to the second tier," he added. It might be wiser, he said, to "be the first in line, have a good story and play to the weakness of Oracle, which is that they have so many people waiting until the end of the year."

Nailing down a huge influx of complicated licensing deals can be overwhelming, even for a company the size of Oracle, Colon said. "For the first time this year, I was seeing six-figure deals missing the quarter because there wasn't enough time. That never happened in the past."

However, Oracle's sales representatives on the whole have been hard bargainers recently, Ramirez said.

"With all the acquisitions [Oracle has made] a lot of times they realize, 'Where is the customer going to go? What are their options? Before, there was a lot more competition. That's the attitude. 'Where are you going to go? We've got you.'"

Colon agreed that Oracle's buying spree has changed the landscape, but from a different perspective. His firm is now seeing clients order nothing for several months, but then buying up a slew of products at once.

"I've never seen that take off as much as it has in the last six months," Colon said. "The positioning from Oracle from all these acquisitions is, 'Now is the time to bundle and get all these things together.'"

On the flip side, customers are being emboldened, he said. "I'm seeing people asking for higher discounts and an overall lower price because they're dealing with one vendor."

Author: Chris Kanaracus @ IDG News Service

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Oracle Acquires Web Application Testing Tools

Oracle plans to integrate the Empirix Web application testing suite with its existing Enterprise Manager and Real Application Testing packages.

One day after it reported a 21 percent increase in its fiscal third quarter 2008 software revenues to $4.2 billion, Oracle announced yet another acquisition, albeit a small one.

The company announced March 27 that it has entered into an agreement to acquire the e-TEST product suite from Empirix, a company that provides voice and Web application testing and monitoring software.

Oracle plans to integrate the software with its Enterprise Manager and Real Application Testing portfolios. The combination, company officials said, is "expected to result in a comprehensive solution for testing packaged and custom built applications."

Oracle is also in the process of acquiring BEA Systems, which has substantial application development tools. The e-TEST suite will likely augment any application development capabilities in BEA.

"Customers are looking for automated application testing solutions that help prevent costly application performance problems, avoid unplanned outages of business-critical applications, and automate the manual steps involved in application testing," said Leng Leng Tan, vice president of applications and systems management at Oracle, in a statement.

"We expect that the combination of Empirix's e-TEST suite and Oracle's Enterprise Manger will create a best-of-breed systems management portfolio spanning the full application life cycle, from development and testing to production deployment and management."

Oracle did not disclose the financial terms of the deal with Empirix.

Oracle has been on a buying spree since 2005, when it acquired PeopleSoft along with JD Edwards, which PeopleSoft had acquired. Since then the company has bought more than forty companies that span database, middleware and applications development.

Ovum analyst David Mitchell said in a March 27 research note that, while Oracle's earnings call Wednesday showed some elements of the company's continued success, there are signs that the global fiscal problems are beginning to have an impact on the industry. "This makes Q4 more interesting than ever in the Oracle economy and with more at stake than ever."

Author: Renee Boucher Ferguson @ www.eweek.com

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Even Oracle Isn't Immune to the Slowdown

A disappointing third quarter highlights the software giant's vulnerability to the ripple effects a sluggish economy is having on IT. Tech investors looking for a stock haven amid roiling markets of late have turned to industry consolidator Oracle. Shares of the software company rose nearly 14% over a three-week span in March as investors bet on Oracle's formidable lead in database software and its aggressive acquisition strategy in business applications as an antidote to the economic malaise that's throttling IT budgets.

Some of those shareholders reconsidered their strategy on Mar. 26 after Oracle released fiscal third-quarter results that fell short of analysts' forecasts. Oracle reported sales of new business application software licenses, a barometer of future revenue, that were about $100 million less than Wall Street expected.

Total sales fell $70 million short of expectations in the period that ended Feb. 29, and Oracle shares fell in extended trading. "Our checks suggested [the results] were going to be pretty solid all around, so we're surprised by this," says Jeff Gaggin, an enterprise software analyst at Avian Securities.
Ellison Looks Ahead

Oracle executives attributed the shortfall to customers who are taking longer to sign off on IT purchases as the economy slows. "Deals are getting done, although they took a bit longer than expected in the last few days of the quarter," Safra Catz, Oracle's co-president and chief financial officer, said during a conference call with investors to discuss the results. Oracle Chief Executive Larry Ellison added that the company faced a difficult comparison with the year-earlier period, when new application license sales rose 57%. Ellison predicted a rebound in the business during the current quarter, which ends in May.

But for now, it's apparent Oracle isn't immune to the slump that's causing some corporations to curtail IT spending, darkening the outlook for a host of tech bellwethers, from Cisco Systems (CSCO), to Intel (INTC), to Dell (DELL). Dell's profits fell by 6.5% in its fourth quarter ended Feb. 1, as financial services companies slowed spending, Intel said on Mar. 3 it expects lower first-quarter profit margins on weaker flash memory prices, and Cisco on Feb. 6 issued a disappointing sales forecast for its third quarter (BusinessWeek.com, 2/8/08), which ended in April.

At Oracle, third-quarter application license revenue increased a mere 6.6%, to $451 million, far short of Wall Street's expectations for 30% growth, to $553 million. Oracle, the dominant supplier of database software, is counting on rapid growth in business applications, which companies use to manage payrolls, chart financial performance, and keep track of inventory levels, to expand in size and take market share from rival SAP (SAP). Oracle has bought about 40 software companies for more than $25 billion in a little more than three years to gain share in the market.

A Fine Ride for Shares

Despite the disappointing third-quarter growth, analysts say Oracle is still well positioned for the future. "Given the environment we're in, it was a decent quarter," says Andy Miedler, a senior technology analyst at Edward Jones. "Make no mistake about it—Oracle, and technology in general, is an economically sensitive area," he adds. "Customers are prudently being more cautious. You'd expect deals will take a little longer to close than they would just a few months ago."

Total revenue rose 21%, to $5.35 billion, in the third quarter, compared with $4.41 billion a year ago. Net income rose nearly 30%, to $1.34 billion, compared with $1.03 billion. On a per-share basis, Oracle earned 26¢, or 30¢ excluding special items, in line with analysts' estimates. But Oracle's revenues fell short of the $5.42 billion expected by analysts surveyed by Thomson Financial (TOC). Operating margins increased to 41%, vs. 39% a year ago.

For most of March, Oracle shares have been on an upward ride. During the three-week period between Mar. 5 and Mar. 26, the shares rose 13.56%, handily outperforming the Nasdaq Composite Index as well as large-cap tech stocks such as Microsoft (MSFT), IBM (IBM), Cisco, and SAP. Oracle shares closed Mar. 26 down 14¢, or 0.7%, at $20.94, and had fallen by more than 8% in after-hours trading.

Oracle forecast results for the quarter ending May 31 that were in line with analysts' estimates. The company said it expects new software license revenues to increase by 10% to 20%, including applications, databases, and middleware. It expects to earn 37¢ or 38¢ per share, compared with 31¢ a year earlier.
Cautious optimism

Moreover, Oracle's flagship database business continues to steam ahead. New license sales for database and middleware software grew 20% in the third quarter, to $1.17 billion, and the company signed database contracts with customers including RealNetworks (RNWK), Salesforce.com (CRM), and Omni Hotels. As Oracle continues to acquire companies, it's positioned itself as a supplier of more of the software its customers use to run their operations.

Oracle added to its middleware portfolio when it bought BEA Systems (BusinessWeek.com, 1/17/08) on Jan. 16 for $8.5 billion after a protracted takeover negotiation. The deal is expected to close during the current quarter. The same day, Oracle acquired document management software maker Captovation for an undisclosed amount.

The net result is that Oracle has a broader palette of products to sell to its customers, which results in sales reps being able to close deals for more products with each customer, UBS (UBS) software analyst Heather Bellini said in a Mar. 6 research report. In a Mar. 26 note she called Oracle's third-quarter application license sales "clearly disappointing," however.

During the company's conference call, Oracle's executives sought to reassure investors that the scope of its third-quarter troubles were limited. "We've been through this before, and we know how to adjust to it," said Oracle Co-President Charles Phillips. The argument is finding some takers. "In a big global economic downturn, should that occur, these guys are well positioned to weather that storm," says Avian Securities' Gaggin.

In the short term, though, investors who have turned to Oracle as a harbor could find the waves a bit rough.

Author: Aaron Ricadela @ www.businessweek.com

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