In the wake of Oracle’s stunning Q4 results and even more-astonishing growth projections, I’d love to hear from the so-called “experts” who’ve spent the past dozen years hollowly and foolishly describing how and why Larry Ellison, Safra Catz, and Oracle will never succeed in the cloud.
Of course, it was and has been a totally different story with Oracle’s customers, who seem to dwell in a separate and far, far-away universe from the experts.
With great self-assurance, those know-it-all blowhards would bore anyone willing to listen with conventional-wisdom nonsense such as:
- Oracle was “late” to the cloud because it didn’t “get” the cloud;
- Oracle would not “commit” to the cloud because it didn’t want to cannibalize its on-prem database business;
- Ellison “didn’t understand” the new tech mindset of the cloud, and Catz “didn’t understand” the new financial dynamics of the cloud;
- Oracle’s culture was “too combative” to embrace the new customer-centric business model required in the cloud;
- Cloud-infrastructure incumbents Microsoft, Google, and Amazon would outspend, out-race, out-innovate, and ultimately crush Oracle’s OCI;
- Cloud-native apps providers Salesforce and Workday would stifle any opportunity for Oracle to build a significant cloud-apps business; and
- A raft of technologically cool but enterprise-unaware database startups would permanently lock Oracle out of the huge cloud-database market.
In the face of all that fever-dream incompetence conjured up by “experts,” I wonder how they explain the position in which supposedly bumblin’ stumblin’ Oracle finds itself today:
- RPO up 41% to $138 billion;
- FY26 RPO projected to grow 100%;
- FY26 cloud revenue projected to grow 40% to about $35 billion; and
- all facets of its cloud business — apps, databases, and infrastructure — growing much more rapidly than competitors?
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Well, while it would be fun to laugh at those arrogant and close-minded “experts” for their humiliatingly atrocious analyses, it’s surely more interesting and worthwhile to hear from the two people whose vision, intelligence, courage, discipline, confidence, and fearlessness have made Oracle one of the hottest companies of any kind in the world.
“We recently got an order from a customer who said, ‘We’ll take all the [AI-training data center] capacity you have, wherever it is — it could be in Europe, it could be in Asia — we’ll just take everything. I mean, we never got an order like that before,” Ellison said on last week’s Q4 earnings call.
‘Insatiable’ Demand
Because businesses across every industry are fully convinced that their future is intertwined with their ability to exploit the power of AI, and because Oracle’s AI training capabilities are being recognized as world-class, “the demand right now seems almost insatiable,” Ellison said.
“I mean, I don’t know how to describe it — I’ve never seen anything remotely like this. People are calling up and asking, ‘Please, can you find us more capacity? We’ll take it wherever you have it. It’s in Malaysia? We’ll take it — that’s fine.'”
On the call, Catz offered some quantitative perspectives to Ellison’s description of totally unprecedented customer demand.
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Breathtaking Guidance from Catz
“Since it’s the beginning of FY26, I’d like to comment on the financial acceleration we expect to see in the coming years,” Catz said in her prepared remarks.
“Between our $138 billion RPO and even larger pipeline, we have a clear line of sight to future revenue growth. So for fiscal year 2026, I expect that:
- “total cloud revenue will grow over 40% in constant currency, up from 24% in FY25”;
- “cloud infrastructure revenue will grow over 70%, up from 51% in FY25”;
- “total [company-wide] revenue will be at least $67 billion, up 16% in constant currency and up more than $1 billion from our prior guidance”;
- “RPO is likely to grow more than 100% in FY26”;
- “And lastly, I expect we will exceed the revenue growth target we previously provided for FY27. Beyond FY27, I am even more confident in our ability to meet and likely exceed our previously provided FY29 targets.”
- You can see some additional details and thoughts in two of my analyses from last week: in video, “Oracle’s Safra Catz: ‘Hypergrowth, Here We Come!’“, and in article form, “Oracle Surges on AI Boom as FY26 Cloud Growth to Blow Past 40%.” “We had a great year, and this year — the one we’re in now —will be even better,” Catz said in reference to FY26, which runs June 1 through May 31.
The cumulative implications of that extraordinary growth were certainly not lost on Catz, whose close partnership with Ellison extends back to 1999 when he hired her to bring some financial and operational discipline to the fast-growing and ambitious company. And no doubt that quarter-century of leadership experience with Ellison shaped her singular comment about the role Oracle expects to earn within the next few years.
“Oracle is well on its way to being not only the world’s largest cloud applications company, but also one of the world’s largest cloud-infrastructure companies.”
The arc of her company’s breathtaking performance, along with Oracle’s unconditional insistence on creating its own future rather than agreeing to play by someone else’s rules, imbues Catz’s outlook with a great deal of credibility. But no doubt some “experts” will soon tell us why Catz doesn’t know what she’s talking about — and that nonsense can provide a little comic relief and perhaps also a sense of gratitude that there’s only a thankfully very small population of such pinheads on Earth.
But as I see it, I’d advise that this latest chapter in Oracle’s truly unique saga provides powerful proof for why you should never — never — bet against Larry Ellison.
