Oracle Corporation to Release Q4 2008 Earnings June 25

Oracle will release the fourth quarter earnings for 2008 on Wednesday, June 25 after the market close. A conference call will be held at 5:00 pm ET that evening to discuss the financial results. Interested parties may listen to the call by visiting oracle.com/investor.

Oracle Corporation is an enterprise software company. Oracle develops, manufactures, markets, distributes and services database and middleware software, as well as applications software that help organizations to manage their businesses.

Oracle is organized into two businesses: software and services. These businesses are further divided into five operating segments. Its software business consists of two operating segments, new software licenses, and software license updates and product support. Its services business consists of three operating segments, consulting, On Demand and education.

In April 2007, it announced the availability of Oracle Manufacturing Execution System for Discrete Manufacturing (Oracle MES for Discrete Manufacturing), a application that enables manufacturers to deploy Oracle Applications directly on the shop floor. In September 2007, it acquired Bridgestream, Inc. In December 2007, it acquired Moniforce. In April 2008, Oracle acquired BEA Systems, Inc.

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Oracle Previews On-demand 'social' CRM Module

Oracle is giving the industry another peek at the first in a planned wave of social networking-infused CRM (customer relationship management) applications this week at the Enterprise 2.0 conference in Boston, but did not supply a release date.

Oracle Sales Prospector, which Oracle first previewed back at its OpenWorld show in November 2007, will ship sometime this quarter, according to Mark Woollen, vice president of CRM development at Oracle, which means anywhere from now to August under Oracle's financial calendar.

The software is supposed to help salespeople find the best leads by analyzing the buying history of companies, based on private and public information. Users contribute data from their sales transactions, which over time improves the database and leads to better recommendations, according to Oracle.

Such a concept banks on the contrary-seeming notion that salespeople -- often competitive souls by nature -- will buy into the idea of sharing potentially valuable information with their peers.

Woollen suggested it will be possible for users to create a "mutual back-scratching society," while acknowledging that they probably won't give away their "book of business" wholesale.

The software features a flashier user interface than typically seen in many CRM systems. On the back end, it is based on the company's Fusion Middleware platform and employs Oracle's data mining technology for analysis, according to Woollen.
But it should "not necessarily" be viewed as the first offering in the long-anticipated wave of Fusion Applications, the vendor's next-generation product line that will gradually replace its current family of software, Woollen said.

That's because Prospector is focused on social networking, as opposed to being a mainline CRM product, he said.

The second version of Sales Prospector will add integrations with transactional CRM systems, including Oracle's Siebel offerings and Salesforce.com, which will enable users who pinpoint a good lead in Prospector to "promote the prospect to an opportunity," Woollen said.

While Oracle is positioning the product as able to complement "virtually any" CRM system, Oracle plans to focus on selling to its own user base, but is also anticipating referrals from one user to another, Woollen said.

The company plans to release updates roughly twice a year, he said. Oracle declined to provide pricing information.

Additional "social CRM" modules are in the pipeline. They include Sales Campaigns, for creating and analyzing e-mail marketing efforts; and Sales Library, which revolves around sharing and rating sales presentations.

Author: Chris Kanaracus @ IDG News Service

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Oracle's Hazy Future

Quiz time. What is the world's top-seller of business software? If you guessed Microsoft, you were wrong. The answer is Oracle, which in 2007 also had the world's best-paid chief executive. Co-founder Larry Ellison took home $193 million last year.

Ellison earned his reward by taking a huge risk that has paid off. He decided to transform Oracle from a company that mostly sold database programs to one that sells many different kinds of software used in all kinds of industries, from energy to insurance. In less than four years, Ellison has strung together a vast array of specialty software makers, buying 42 companies for upwards of $30 billion. His best-known quarry: PeopleSoft, Siebel Systems and, most recently, BEA Systems.

A former Oracle employee who's impressed with the growth strategy is Peter Goldmacher, who now follows the Redwood Shores, Calif., giant for investment bank Cowen and Co. Says Goldmacher: "People were very skeptical. Ellison bought up companies past their prime when no one else cared. Now, Oracle offers so much more to its customers."

Goldmacher says that Oracle's sum is greater than its parts because owning so many products allows it to save money on sales, marketing and distribution -- among the top cost centers in the software industry. "Oracle customers can now buy a larger variety of products, leading to significant profit margin expansion," he says.

Oracle's shopping spree has made it the top seller of databases used by computer networks and products that allow computers and software to interact. Ellison says he also wants Oracle to be the leader in its third main product category, "enterprise" software for the business world. Those are the vital applications that make businesses productive, including automatic billing and online security. Germany's SAP ( SAP) currently holds the top spot in that area.

How well Oracle -- and its stock -- perform in the future will depend on how well the company succeeds at stitching together its many moving parts. Oracle must integrate many kinds of different software so they can talk to each other. Oracle calls this massive undertaking "Fusion" and has already released multiple software applications as part of the project. Fusion has been described as an effort to cherry-pick the best features and ideas and stitch them together with a rewritten software code.
Shares of Oracle, which closed at $22.46 on June 6, are flat so far this year, putting them slightly ahead of both Standard & Poor's 500-stock index and the technology-rich Nasdaq Composite Index. The stock is about 50% below its all-time high, set in 2000.

Oracle sells for a premium to the overall stock market, but that doesn't mean the stock is overpriced. The stock trades at 17 times the $1.36 per share that analysts expect Oracle to earn in the four quarters that end next November. That compares with a price-earnings ratio of 15 for the S&P 500 (based on estimated 2008 profits) and estimated profit growth for Oracle of 14.5% a year over the next few years.

Oracle is due to report results for the fourth quarter and its full fiscal year, which ended May 31, on June 25. For the quarter, according to Thomson Financial, analysts expect the company to earn 44 cents a share on revenues of $6.85 billion. For the fiscal year, they see earnings of $1.27 per share on sales of $22.17 billion. The results should provide some indication of whether Oracle's business customers are cutting back on spending because of the weak economy. That is a risk for the stock.

Despite the flurry of purchases, Oracle's balance sheet is strong. As of its last financial report, Oracle held cash and securities worth $10.5 billion, while it carried long-term debt of $6.2 billion.

Analyst Goldmacher views Oracle as a steady, modest grower and he says he thinks the stock is a "relatively undervalued asset." Analyst Robert Becker of Argus Research is also bullish, noting in a recent report that Oracle's "strong, recurring revenue stream will help prosperity continue." His 12-month price target for the stock is $27.

Author: Amy Bickers, Associate Editor @ Kiplinger.com

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