Profile: Oracle Corporation (ORCL.O)

Oracle Corporation (Oracle), incorporated in 2005, is an enterprise software company. The Company develops, manufactures, markets, distributes and services database and middleware software, as well as applications software that help its customers 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. The Company’s software and services businesses represented 81% and 19% of its total revenues, during the fiscal year ended May 31, 2009 (fiscal 2009). In July 2009, the Company completed the acquisition of Relsys International, Inc. In January 2010, the Company announced that it has acquired Silver Creek Systems, Inc. (Silver Creek), a provider of product data quality solutions. In January 2010, the Company acquired Sun Microsystems, Inc.

Software Business

The Company's new software licenses segment includes the licensing of database and middleware software, which consists of Oracle Database and Oracle Fusion Middleware, as well as applications software. Its technology and business solutions are based on an Internet model that comprises interconnected database servers, application servers, as well as mobile devices. This architecture enables users to access business data and applications through a Web browser interface. Oracle technology operates on single server or clustered server configurations, and supports a choice of operating systems, including Linux, UNIX and Windows. New software license revenues include fees earned from granting customers licenses to use the Company's software products, and exclude revenues derived from software license updates and product support. New software license revenues represented 31% of the Company's total revenues during fiscal 2009.

The Company’s database and middleware software provides a platform for running and managing business applications for mid-size businesses and large global enterprises. The ability to assign computing resources as required simplifies its customers’ computing capacity, planning and procurement in order to support all of their business applications. With an Oracle grid infrastructure, its customers can lower their investment in information technology (IT) hardware.

Oracle Database enables the storage, retrieval and manipulation of all forms of data, including business application and analytics data, and unstructured data in the form of eXtensible Markup Language (XML) files, office documents, images, video and spatial data. Designed for enterprise grid computing, the Oracle Database is available in four editions: Express Edition, Standard Edition One, Standard Edition and Enterprise Edition. Oracle Exadata is a family of storage software and hardware products that is designed to improve data warehouse query performance.

Oracle Enterprise Manager is designed to monitor service levels and performance, automate tasks, manage configuration information, and provide change management in a unified way across groups of computers or grids. Oracle Enterprise Manager’s provisioning automates the discovery, tracking and scheduling of software patches and allows IT administrators to apply patches without taking their system down. In addition, IT administrators can manage systems from anywhere through a hypertext markup language (HTML) browser or through wireless personal digital assistants (PDAs). With Oracle Audit Vault, security and database administrators can manage audit policies across their enterprise and collect audit data from Oracle and non-Oracle databases into a centralized repository.

Oracle Fusion Middleware is a family of application infrastructure products that forms a foundation, on which customers can build, deploy, secure, access and integrate business applications and automate their business processes. Oracle Fusion Middleware suites and products can be used in conjunction with custom, packaged and composite applications. Oracle Business Intelligence (BI) provides visibility into how customers’ businesses are performing and helps them plan and model to improve that performance. BI is a portfolio of technology and applications that provides an integrated end-to-end system called Enterprise Performance Management (EPM) that unites the Company’s BI foundation and data warehousing products with the Company’s BI and EPM applications to offer its customers an enterprise-wide business intelligence platform.

The Company’s BI foundation products include Oracle BI Suite Enterprise Edition Plus, Oracle BI Standard Edition One and Oracle BI Publisher. Its BI foundation products deliver customers a set of business intelligence tools, including dashboards, ad hoc query and analysis, detection and alerts, reporting and publishing, real-time predictive intelligence, mobile analytics and desktop gadgets.

Oracle Identity and Access Management products and suites enable its customers to manage multiple user identities, provision users in multiple enterprise applications and systems and manage access privileges for customers, employees and partners. Oracle WebCenter Suite enables personalized Web portals and task-oriented Web applications to be developed and deployed, all with single sign-on access and security. Through Oracle Data Integration Suite, the Company offers unified data integration technologies that enable customers to build, deploy and manage enterprise business data. Oracle JDeveloper is an integrated software environment designed to facilitate development of Java applications, portlets, Web services, process models and rich Internet applications (RIA), such as Flash and AJAX.

The Company’s applications software products combine business functionality with technologies, such as role-based analytics, search, identity management, self-service and workflow to deliver industry processes, business intelligence and insights, and end-user productivity. Oracle offers a spectrum of enterprise resource planning (EPM) applications that are open, industry-specific analytic applications with capabilities, such as dashboarding and embedded analytic functionality for delivering insight across the enterprise.

Oracle offers its customers with support services, including its Lifetime Support policy, product enhancements and upgrades. Software license updates provide customers with rights to unspecified software product upgrades and maintenance releases and patches released during the term of the support period. Product support includes Internet and telephone access to technical support personnel located in the Company’s global support centers, as well as Internet access to technical content through My Oracle Support. The Company offers Oracle Unbreakable Linux Support, which provides enterprise level support for the Linux operating system and Oracle VM server virtualization software support.

Services Business

Oracle Consulting assists customers in deploying its applications and technology products. The Company’s consulting services include business/IT strategy alignment, business process simplification, solution integration, and product implementation, enhancements and upgrades.

On Demand includes Oracle On Demand and Advanced Customer Services offerings. Oracle On Demand provides multi-featured software and hardware management and maintenance services for customers that deploy over the Internet its database, middleware and applications software delivered at the Company’s data center facilities, select partner data centers or physically onsite at customer facilities.

The Company provides training to customers, partners and employees. Oracle offers thousands of courses covering all of its product offerings. Its training is provided primarily through public and private instructor-led classroom events, but is also made available through a variety of online courses and self-paced media training on compact disc and read-only memory (CD-ROMs). In addition, the Company also offers a certification program certifying database administrators, developers and implementers. Oracle University also offers user adoption services designed to provide training services to help customers.

The Company competes with Microsoft Corporation, Hewlett Packard Company, International Business Machines Corporation, Sybase, Inc., NCR Corporation, SAS Institute, Inc., Netezza Corporation, Progress Software Corporation, SAP AG, Fujitsu Software Corporation, Hitachi Software Engineering Co., Ltd., Red Hat, Inc., Apache Geronimo, Liferay, Inc., SpringSource, Inc., MuleSource, Inc., JasperSoft Corporation, TIBCO Software, Inc., Software AG, SOA Software, Inc., Savvion, Inc., MicroStrategy, Inc., CA, Inc., Siemens AG, Courion Corporation, EMC Corporation, Informatica Corporation, Novell, Inc., Lombardi Software, Inc., Pegasystems, Inc., Accenture Ltd., Automatic Data Processing, Inc., Fidelity Investments, Ceridian Corporation, Hewitt Associates, Inc., Accero Software, Software, Inc., Infor Global Solutions, Ariba, Inc., IFS AB, JDA Software Group, Inc., I2 Technologies, Inc., Manhattan Associates, Inc., The Sage Group plc, salesforce.com, Inc., Taleo Corporation, SuccessFactors, Inc., Open Text Corporation, Autonomy Corporation plc, Vignette Corporation, Alfresco Software, Inc., Eclipse Foundation, Inc., BMC Software, Inc., Quest Software, Inc., Compuware Corporation, Embarcadero Technologies, Inc., Hyperic, Inc., Canonical Ltd., VMware, Inc., Citrix Systems, Inc., Bearing Point, Inc. and Capgemini Group.