Oracle cloud message falters as company misses earnings and revenue forecasts for Q1 2017

Is acquiring NetSuite going to be enough to turn the tide?

Oracle's attempts to keep pushing cloud are looking dicey again as the company's Q1 2017 financial results have seen it come in below expectations by a cool $100m. Wall Street expected $8.7bn, but the company only delivered $8.6bn, casting the firm's cloud message - which is fighting the likes of IBM, Salesforce and Microsoft for a place at the table - into doubt, especially as Larry Ellison purses a $9.3bn acquisition of NetSuite in order to keep growing cloud capability.

Oracle's shares went up 1.52 per cent in preparation for yesterday's news, but finished the day down by one per cent.

The disappointment didn't, however, stop joint CEO Mark Hurd having his typical pop at Oracle's rivals, as he insisted Oracle was ahead of at least one specific competitor:

"In the first quarter alone, we added more than 750 new SaaS customers including 344 new SaaS Fusion ERP customers - that's more ERP customers than Workday has sold in the history of their company," he said in a statement.

"This year we are on track to sell more than $2bn of SaaS and PaaS annually recurring revenue. We believe this will be the second year in a row that Oracle has sold more SaaS and PaaS than any cloud services provider," Hurd added.

But it's clear Oracle's on-premise licensing business is still the core of whatever growth the company is still experiencing, with a 2 per cent rise in existing licence revenue - accounting for $4.79bn, while cloud - despite Hurd's positivity - has made only $969m in revenue this year, though at a 59 per cent growth increase for combined cloud initiatives.

Computing, V3 and The Inquirer will be on the ground at Oracle's OpenWorld 2016 conference in San Francisco next week, carefully evaluating the company's ongoing cloud argument, as well as covering any interesting new launches, that NetSuite acquisition, and picking up feedback from Oracle customers.