Safra Catz made sole CEO of Oracle despite flat revenues

Catz now officially sole CEO of Oracle as the company reports flat revenues and profits

Safra Catz has become the sole CEO of Oracle following the death of her co-CEO Mark Hurd in October this year. The news was confirmed last week following the unveiling of the company's second quarter results.

"We have no plans for having a second CEO, it was an unusual situation," Oracle co-founder and chairman Ellison said. "Mark and Safra were a fantastic team, but we have complete confidence in our existing team."

Revenues in the second quarter were up by just one per cent to $9.61 billion, compared to the same quarter a year earlier, while net income was down, also by one per cent, to $2.32 billion. The company is struggling on a number of fronts with cloud computing providing an alternative for customers who, for many years, have feel that they have been held captive by Oracle.

Indeed, despite the company's claims, there's scant indication of a surge in revenues from customers flocking to the Oracle Cloud. The company reports cloud under two headings, bundled with other products and services. One is ‘Cloud Services and Licence Support Revenues', which together were up by just three per cent to $6.94 billion. Cloud and On-Premise Licence revenues, meanwhile, fell by seven per cent to $1.13 billion.

Also falling were hardware revenues - largely the old Sun Microsystems business - which were down by two per cent to $871 million, and services revenues, which fell by one per cent to $817 million.

However, Catz chose to accentuate the positive, describing the quarter as "solid". She continued: "We had another strong quarter in our Fusion and NetSuite cloud applications businesses with Fusion ERP revenues growing 37 per cent and NetSuite ERP revenues growing 29 per cent."

NetSuite was acquired by Oracle in July 2016 in a $9.3 billion deal.

Catz claimed that the fall in Cloud and On-Premise Licence revenues was down to customers shifting to cloud over purchases of software licences - this could, perhaps, be illustrated more clearly if only the company was able to report its cloud revenues separate from its software revenues...