Riding high on the gains of 2018‘s fiscal year’s revenue of whopping $9.2
bn, Oracle announced that it is gearing up for the launch of fully autonomous
database cloud service on Oct. 1 at Oracle OpenWorld. . It will start shipping
the product by the end of 2017.
"In a couple of weeks, we will announce the world's first fully autonomous database
cloud service," said Oracle's Chairman and
CTO, Larry
Ellison. "Based on machine learning, the latest version of Oracle is a totally
automated "self-driving" system that does not require human beings to
manage or tune the database. Using AI to eliminate most sources of human error
enables Oracle to offer database SLA's that guarantee 99.995% reliability while charging much less than AWS."
The CTO took shots at Amazon Web Services (AWS) and Salesforce-its Saas rival - claiming that Oracle is quickly running out of competition and will look inwards and focus on Innovation. Salesforce was quick to retaliate. Marc Benioff twitted - "Have you ever wondered why Oracle never talks about market share or customers on their earnings call?" It will be worthwhile to note that AWS has targeted Oracle's core database business on many fronts with a series of databases such as Redshift and so it wasn't a surprise that Mark Hurd, CEO Oracle claimed that AWS' MySQL-based Aurora database and its open source version, Redshift, are old fashion technologies in comparison to Oracle's new database that allows users to load data at the push of a button.
Oracle kicked off its 2018 fiscal year by reporting more than $9bn in total revenues. The highlights of its Q1, fiscal year 2018 are as follow -
Table 1: Q1 FISCAL 2018 FINANCIAL RESULTS (GAAP MEASURES)
($ in millions)
| |
Q1 FY 2018
|
Q1 FY 2017
|
|
Total cloud and on-premise software revenues
|
$7384
|
$6791
|
|
Total operating expenses
|
$6366
|
$5954
|
|
Net income
|
$2.2bn (GAAP)
|
$1.83bn
|
|
Total cloud revenues
|
$1467
|
$969
|
|
Total hardware revenues
|
$943
|
$996
|
|
Total services revenues
|
$808
|
$860
|
|
Total revenue
|
$9187
|
$8595
|
- Earnings per share of $0.62 edged out analyst estimates of $0.60.
- Cloud revenues were up 51 per cent from year ago.
- On-premise software revenues were 2 per cent from Q1 FY2017.
- Hardware revenues were down 5 per cent compared to FY2017.
- Services revenues were up 6 per cent from the last year’s 1st quarter.
"Based on machine learning, this new version of Oracle is totally automated, self-driving system that does not require a human being either to manage the database or tune the database," Ellison said, according to a Seeking Alpha transcript of the conference call with investors. Oracle CEO Mark Hurd said his company's database costs less because it automates more. In August, the company announced its database platform now runs on Oracle's bare metal cloud infrastructure.