Oracle looks to rebound in typically strong quarter

Oracle Corp. is expected to post solid profit and sales gains when it reports results after the market's close Wednesday for its fiscal fourth-quarter, typically its strongest period of the year.

The software giant is looking to rebound after delivering largely disappointing results in its previous, third quarter. See related story.
Analysts on average estimate business software maker Oracle (ORCL 22.70, +0.26, +1.2%) will report earnings excluding special items of 45 cents a share for the period ended in May, and $6.85 billion in revenue, according to FactSet Research.
That compares to earnings excluding special items of 37 cents a share, and $5.83 billion in revenue in the same period a year earlier.

While concerns have been raised about Oracle's performance amid the U.S. economic slowdown, the company is expected to be bolstered by overseas sales and an acquisition spree that has it well positioned in its various businesses.
Shares of Oracle have risen nearly 15% in the past three months, and closed Thursday at $22.70.

Oracle closed its $8.5 billion acquisition of middleware provider BEA Systems Inc. in April, and Jefferies & Co. analyst Ross MacMillan wrote in a note to clients Wednesday that he expects that to contribute earnings of a penny a share in Oracle's fiscal 2009, and 3 cents a share in 2011.

MacMillan wrote that Oracle is now able to make deep cost cuts at BEA, which should increase BEA's operating margin to 43% from 21% by the end of fiscal 2009.
For its recently ended quarter, MacMillan predicted a "rebound" in the Oracle's applications business, and "modest U.S. weakness."

"Europe and [Asia] remain strong and should continue to bolster the weaker Americas," MacMillan wrote.
Citigroup analyst Brent Thill wrote in a note to clients Wednesday that Oracle's recent price increases are a positive sign. On June 16, the company issued new prices for products that reflected a significant jump.

"We view this hike as positive for [Oracle's] overall business," Thill wrote, because they reflect the company's dominant or second place position in its various markets.

"We have not witnessed a price lift of this magnitude for many years," Thill wrote.
While Oracle may well eventually drain the well of potential new acquisitions to further fuel its growth, Thill wrote that this is still a number of years away.
The company should be able to grow and expand margins through fiscal 2011, "as it makes further purchases," Thill wrote.

Author: John Letzing @ www.marketwatch.com

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Oracle Reportedly Raises Prices 15%-20% On Major Pdts

Oracle (ORCL) has raised prices by 15%-20% “across all major product lines,” according to a brief research note this afternoon by Citigroup’s Brent Thill. Now, you want to keep in mind that Oracle negotiates prices with customers of any significant size, so the numbers on the price list are not necessarily what people actually pay. But that said, it still is an eye-opening development.

Thill says the company has not installed a price increase of this magnitude “for many years.”

According to the note, Thill examined the price list release earlier this week and compared it to previous lists to uncover the price increases.

So how can they get away with this in an soft IT spending environment? Thill says there are three reasons. One, the company is the first or second leading player in each of the categories in which they play. Two, it has been a long time since it raised prices this much. And three, he notes that customers rarely pay list prices after negotiating.

Oracle today is up 5 cents at $22.58.

Author: Eric Savitz @ http://blogs.barrons.com/techtraderdaily

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Overstock.com Improves Customer Shopping Experience with Oracle

Oracle® Coherence Integrates with Overstock.com’s Existing SOA Infrastructure to Reduce Critical Response Times
Redwood Shores, Calif.

* Overstock.com, an online "closeout" retailer offering discount, brand-name merchandise for sale over the Internet, has implemented Oracle® Coherence 3.3, in-memory data grid and component of Oracle Fusion Middleware, to enhance its SOA infrastructure and improve the search performance of its popular Web store, Oracle today announced.

* Overstock.com, ranked among the top 10 most trafficked retail Web sites on Cyber Monday 2007, foresaw potential bottlenecks in its infrastructure, given the massive and unpredictable loads experienced particularly during the busiest shopping day of the year.

* With Oracle Coherence, Overstock.com delivers fast and reliable access to frequently searched data, improving customer search response times by nearly 100 percent and guided navigation response times by over 200 percent. These improvements correlate to increased conversion rates and revenue.

* Start-to-finish, the Oracle Coherence implementation took just two months, leveraging the skilled Java development team at Overstock.com. Oracle Database and Oracle Real Application Clusters provide the data foundation for Overstock.com’s SOA architecture with Oracle Coherence providing added performance, scalability, resilience and reduced downtime.

* A component of Oracle Fusion Middleware, Oracle Coherence enables users to push data closer to the application for faster access and greater resource utilization. By automatically and dynamically partitioning data in-memory across multiple servers, Oracle Coherence helps provide continuous data availability and transactional integrity, even in the event of a server failure. As a shared infrastructure, the offering combines data locality with local processing power to perform real-time data analysis, in-memory grid computations, and parallel transaction and event processing.

* In addition to utilizing Oracle Database and Oracle Coherence, Overstock.com also runs Oracle enterprise resource planning applications.

Source: www.oracle.com

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