Oracle CEO Says Startling Announcements Next Week (ORCL)

It all started Thursday when Oracle ORCL CEO, Larry Ellison, told Wall Street analysts, during the company's quarterly conference call that there would be a series of big announcements next week.

According to the conference call, Ellison said, "Next week we will be announcing technology partnerships with the largest and most important SaaS companies (software-as-a-service) and infrastructure companies in the cloud."

In the conference call, Ellison specifically mentioned NetSuite N, Salesforce.com CRM, and Microsoft Corporation MSFT, but did not go into detail, instead saying simply there would be a “startling series of announcements.”

The subject of the conversation was Oracle’s new cloud database, Oracle 12c, leading to the “not so startling” conclusion that the partnerships have something to do with that product.

Meanwhile, sfgate.com reported that Microsoft just sent out invitations to a news conference to be held Monday featuring Microsoft’s Steve Ballmer, Microsoft’s cloud guru, Satya Nadella, and Oracle president, Mark Hurd.

All this days ahead of Microsoft’s worldwide developer conference in San Francisco where, according to Softpedia.com, Microsoft will announce the public beta of Windows 8.1 and – wait for it – a new partnership with Oracle!

OK, so now it all starts to make sense. Except in some ways it doesn’t make sense. As PC World reported, SaaS vendors like NetSuite and Salesforce have long used Oracle’s database and an upgrade to 12c is not big news. Microsoft is another story. It has its own, competing SQL Server database. The Microsoft connection, therefore, becomes a significant and interesting part of the story.

Oracle said it expects the 12c to be the “foundation of a modern cloud,” not an insignificant aspiration. It will have multitenancy capability at the database layer, thereby reducing cost and increasing security according to Oracle.

Multitenancy refers to a design that allows multiple companies to use the same database. The multitenancy capability in 12c will be a separately priced option according to Ellison.

Oracle came into cloud-based computing reluctantly, according to International Business Times, and was more or less forced to make the transition late last year after a slump in sales and online subscriptions.

The company, Thursday, announced Q4 earnings that showed $3.8 billion or $0.80 per share. EPS, excluding one-time items met analyst expectations of $0.87 per share, but revenue, at $10.95 billion was short of Wall Street’s expectations of $11.12 billion.

Oracle shares lost more than eight percent Thursday, closing at $30.30 in after-market trading.

At the time of this writing, Jim Probasco had no position in any mentioned securities.