Welcome to the Cloud Wars Minute — your daily cloud news and commentary show. Each episode provides insights and perspectives around the “reimagination machine” that is the cloud.
In today’s Cloud Wars Minute, I dive into Oracle’s remarkable Q4 earnings report, where the company delivered results that exceeded expectations across the board.
Highlights
00:02 — We had a monster Q4 report from Oracle yesterday, absolutely crushed its numbers for Q4, led by an astonishing leap in their backlog or remaining performance obligation (RPO) of $638 billion, That’s an increase of 363%. And no, those are not misprints.
00:29 — RPO represents business that’s fully contracted, not yet recognized as revenue, so it’s pipeline backlog, as opposed to revenue, which has already been posted for what has happened in the past. So I wanted to quickly pop out a couple highlights here that go along with that. Just remarkable RPO growth, cloud revenue overall was up 47% to 9.9 billion.
00:56 — Within that, cloud applications grew 10% to 4.1 billion, and the big star of the company, now their cloud infrastructure business was up 93% to $5.8 billion. One other number that Oracle put in its Q4 press release, that is pretty darn impressive, its multi-cloud AI database business, it said, was up 404% and it said that now makes this the fastest growing product in the company’s history.
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02:11 — Looking ahead a little bit, Oracle guided in Q1, it said its cloud business will grow between 57 and 63% so caught about 60% and that extends a long-running streak of fast-growing numbers there for Oracle’s cloud revenue or cloud business.
02:33 — Oracle also said in its Q4 press release that it will be doing no more borrowing to fund its data center expansion throughout for calendar 2026, certainly possible for next year, but for this calendar year, no more borrowing. I think most people would yawn or overlook that fact. There have been a lot of folks on Wall Street, though as I’ve mentioned, that this has caused them fainting spells and pearl clutching, because they, nobody’s done this before.
03:44 — Now, I don’t know, I don’t think there’s a lot of companies that have run into that challenge before. It’s a delightful challenge to have, but it is not something that you know a lot of companies can just, you know, reach into the petty cash box and say, you know, here’s $100 billion $200 billion dollars to fund it.
