Controlled descent into terrain
Services + Support was 51% last year, now up to 53% of total revenues.
Take notice of this trend.
Milking the existing customers at the expense of new businesses is typical of a company that is past its peak.
Existing customers are fed-up of increased costs and getting milked. Being held hostages -- as their critical systems are too "Oracle encumbered" -- they slowly abandon ship, replacing subsystem after subsystem to reduce their own costs wherever feasible. But realize that this process takes years.
It is a slow process of becoming irrelevant. Indicators to watch: top line (revenue) lack of growth and service/support percentage of revenue. Earnings can be more easily manipulated so they should be ignored.
For more perspective, look around you: all new, up-and-coming, at scale companies (Google, Facebook, Twitter, Amazon...) use distributed commodity hardware, cloud or not, with Free databases, relational (MariaDB, Percona, PostgresSQL) or not (mongo, cassandra, redis, hadoop+Impala, etc.). The number of good options here is large and the ROI of replacing Oracle makes the switch a no brainer. All those who start from scratch, without historical baggage, do their data without Oracle.
Depending on Oracle is proving to be a very costly business mistake. Lesson learned: when their salespeople and lawyers come calling, run away fast.
Their fall may not be as spectacuar as Sun's because their huge installed base (>95% of Fortune 500 companies are literally hostages) but make no mistake: they are a dinosaur in a world of much better alternatives. Survival of the fittest, plain and simple.