You can’t really say that the U.S. markets as a whole are at all-time highs anymore, but one established tech company has climbed to its all-time peak after great earnings reported yesterday.
Oracle, a household name in database and successive technologies, stands at around $57 today — that’s above a prior peak in April, and significantly above Oracle’s $40 heyday before the dotcom bubble broke in 2000.
Since then, Oracle has been going in new and exciting places, and ORCL reflects that…
Reports yesterday showed $1.16 in earnings per share, beating expectations for $1.07 per share. Q4 revenues totaled $11.1 billion, outstripping Wall Street estimates of $10.93 billion, and with revenue up 1% year over year, investors hopped on the Oracle bandwagon, driving the price up some 8%.
Oracle management revealed in press statements that much of the growth comes from the company’s cloud applications, and from ERP in particular.
That resonates with an enterprise marketing clamoring for some of Oracle’s new services such as Oracle Enterprise Resource Planning Cloud, a kind of ‘wizard’ for accounting, financial management, project management, and procurement, and Oracle IoT offerings, which have to contend with relatively few front-runners in a nascent field.
As a business segment, Cloud Services and License support revenues accounted for $6.8 billion in revenue for the quarter.
Leaders at Oracle are also touting the company’s Fusion and NetSuite cloud applications. Fusion middleware, a business platform utilizing cloud design, facilitates the administration of agile “BI” programs with modern SOA. Oracle’s acquisition of NetSuite exemplifies the kind of “front-end/back-end” marriage that merges kingdoms in today’s tech age.
In general, Oracle moves show the company is getting out of legacy hardware and into regions like cloud-native and IoT, which makes sense given the company’s long-standing position in the vanguard of work and ERP, and as a major force in enterprise tech. Moving from a database leader in the last decade to a cloud power in this one seems to suit the tech firm well, with a sea change toward broad cloud adoption that started years ago but is still happening.
As the icing on the cake, investors expect a cash dividend of $0.24 per share.
ORCL is one to watch in the tech sector, whether it’s for long-term buy and hold, or to beat inflation and crashes elsewhere in what’s likely to be a volatile market through 2020.
