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 Q3 results, noting significant growth in remaining performance obligations, cloud infrastructure, and plans to expand data center capacity by 2025.
Highlights
00:30 — So, Q3 for the quarter ended February 28: Oracle’s remaining performance obligations (RPO) soared 63% to $130 billion. Each of the last two quarters, the growth rate has been about 47%–48%. The total for remaining performance obligations, which is business that has been signed in contracts but not yet recognized as revenue, has been about $97 or $98 billion.
01:16 — Its database multi-cloud business saw revenue for that quarter increase by almost 92%. Oracle CEO Safra Catz said that in Q3 — not just its cloud revenue, but the total company revenue for Oracle, including its traditional business plus its cloud business overall — was up. Revenue grew 6%. Catz said that for fiscal year 2026, running from June 1 through May 31, that corporate growth number is expected to increase from the recent Q3 figure of 6% to 15%.
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02:59 — A couple of things that Chairman Larry Ellison said in the press release: in calendar 2025, Oracle will double its data center capacity. For the past two years, Ellison and Catz have said that its revenue could have been higher, but it couldn’t build data center capacity as fast as the demand required. Now, it’s going to double it, which should be a big boost for Oracle. Ellison also alluded to a new product from Oracle, which he called the “Oracle AI Data Platform.”
04:13 — Regarding the RPO numbers, if you look at Microsoft’s RPO, it’s higher. But this is just a stunning figure. The growth for RPO over the last couple of quarters has been 48%, 49%, and now 63%. Another number I’ll toss out quickly is from its SaaS business or cloud applications. Overall, it was up 9%, but its ERP Fusion Cloud ERP and NetSuite ERP were both up 16%.
