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 cover Oracle’s Q2 results.
Highlights
00:19 — One of the hottest Cloud Wars Top 10 companies right now is Oracle. And I want to talk today a little bit about Oracle’s Q2 results from last week. I think there’s been a little bit of the fog of war, the fog of AI war specifically here, that has obscured the impact behind what’s really going on with Oracle’s numbers.
01:06 — Let’s look at Oracle’s RPO (remaining performance obligation) results from Q2. RPO rose 433% to $523 billion. Far bigger than any RPO any other company has in the last three months, due in large part to deals with NVIDIA, Meta, and others not named. These are hard and fast numbers about where Oracle’s business is headed in the future
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02:36 — What’s going on elsewhere? The biggest cloud vendor in the world, Microsoft, its most recent RPO numbers went up 51% to $392 billion. Those are remarkable numbers. Looking forward, customers around AI and cloud are giving far more of their contracted future business to Oracle than to Microsoft.
04:06 — Oracle’s OCI cloud business is bigger than its applications business. Its Autonomous Database revenue rose 40%, and its multi-cloud business is up 817%. That number is a little misleading, because the business is relatively new, but I don’t know anybody out there who would not want to have businesses growing at 817%.
04:45 — I’ve been focusing a lot on RPOs for the last two and a half years or so. It’s a great indicator of where customers are committing their money for the future. These big contracts that have signed are going into the past. Nothing wrong with that, but that reflects where the money in the past has gone. RPO is showing the future.
