
ya...
Read: Oracle has audited their customer base, and told everyone out of compliance to either buy into the cloud vision or pay a trillion dollars in penalties.
Enterprise IT giant Oracle is once again pointing to a growing cloud business to gloss over lackluster financial numbers in other parts of its business. Big Red on Wednesday said that its $8.4bn in first-quarter [PDF] revenues (ending August 31) were down 2 per cent over the same period in 2014, when it logged $8.5bn. Earnings …
Much as the ritual bashing of $BIGCORP is fun, you can't really ignore the fact that over the past year the dollar has gained 15% against the Euro, 12% against the Yen and 5% against the Pound. Since most large IT companies make more than half their sales outside the $ zone this really does have an impact, as the constant-currency results show.
Didn't Oracle claim a weaker dollar over the last year caused their results to be worse?
No. The Oracle statement said "The strengthening of the US dollar compared to foreign currencies had a significant impact on results in the quarter". It was The Register who, in their eagerness to pooh-pooh this, misquoted the statement.
In my recent (and not so recent experience) of running Oracle and SAP programmes and projects, my view is that it would help both companies if they started releasing software that actually worked out of the box, or after configuration.
It seems to me that these days, both companies align to the strategy of shoving half-baked applications and services out of the door without the requisite testing having been done; and then use their customer implementation projects as beta-tests, only to be fixed by a myriad of (also crap) patches down the line - thereby delaying many a go-live.
Don't get me started on the quality of the Oracle UK "consulting and implementation" team. They are not far off of making HP Professional services look halfaway competent.