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 episode, I take a deep dive into Oracle’s Q4 results that could soon make Oracle the world’s fastest-growing major cloud provider.
Highlights
00:13 — Oracle is the prototypical example of a company that went out and created its own future several years ago, got into the cloud infrastructure business, got laughed at. But, Oracle has demonstrated that it definitely has earned the right to be called the fourth hyperscaler in their Q4 numbers that came out yesterday.
00:47 — Oracle CEO Safra Catz did not literally say “Hypergrowth, here we come,” but I think that really sums up some of her perspectives on what happened last quarter and where she sees the business headed into the future. For FY26, Catz says that Oracle’s cloud business will grow more than 40% over that fiscal year. She says the RPO for FY26 will grow more than 100%.
02:06 — If these two things come to pass, particularly cloud revenue up 40%, that would definitely make Oracle the world’s fastest growing major cloud provider, and definitely the fastest on the Cloud Wars Top 10. You rarely see an executive in the tech industry, even in these heady growth days, be so bullish on future growth prospects.
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03:09 – In Q4, cloud revenue is up 27% to 6.7 billion, RPO up 41% to 138 billion, OCI business for the year was up 50%, Catz is projecting that for the coming year, that growth rate for Oracle Cloud Infrastructure will jump to 70%. Its multi-cloud business was up 115%, and its Cloud@Customer business was up 104%.
04:16 — It was not that long ago that a lot of people said Larry Ellison and Safra Catz have lost their minds. They cannot possibly succeed in the cloud infrastructure business. Microsoft, Amazon, and Google are already there. Oracle will never make it. These numbers show that it did. It used advanced technology, new approaches, different ways, new routes to market, to defy all those naysayers and to dazzle customers.
05:00 — So all of this, I think, means that there’s going to be continued, superb opportunities for buyers because it’s got incredibly intense, wicked, forward-looking competition among these big vendors, and that’s just going to create fantastic opportunities for customers. That’s why we always say here at Cloud Wars, the biggest winners are always, always the customers.
