Oracle Crushes Q4 and Remains World’s Hottest Major Cloud Provider

While most other Cloud Wars Top 10 vendors have reported moderating growth rates, Oracle’s cloud business accelerated dramatically in its fiscal Q4 with overall cloud revenue up 54% to $4.4 billion and cloud-infrastructure revenue up an astonishing 76% to $1.4 billion.

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Let me put Oracle’s whopping Q4 growth rate in perspective by comparing it to the most recent growth rates for the other Cloud Wars Top 10 companies. I’ve ranked them here not by their current standing on the Cloud Wars Top 10 — you can see those latest rankings here — but by growth rates.

1. Oracle 54% growth, quarterly cloud revenue of $4.4. billion
2. Google Cloud 28% growth, quarterly cloud revenue of $7.5 billion
3. SAP (tie) 24% growth, quarterly cloud revenue of $3.5 billion
4. ServiceNow (tie) 24% growth, quarterly cloud revenue of $2.02 billion
5. Microsoft 22% growth, quarterly cloud revenue of $28.5 billion
6. Workday 20% subscription growth, quarterly cloud revenue of $1.53 billion
7. Amazon 16% growth, quarterly cloud revenue of $21.4 billion
8. Salesforce 11% growth, quarterly cloud revenue of $8.25 billion
9. IBM 10%??? growth, no longer breaks out quarterly cloud revenue
10. Snowflake 50% subscription growth, cloud revenue $590 million

So we have Oracle’s cloud business growing at 54%, and the only other company even in the same zip code is Snowflake, which grew at 50% on “only” $590 million in subscription revenue. (I place Snowflake at the bottom of these growth rankings because its revenue is relatively so much smaller than those of the other Top 10 companies — when Snowflake’s quarterly revenue reaches $1 billion, I’ll rank them accordingly with the others.)

So if we set Snowflake aside, these numbers mean that Oracle at 54% is not only the fastest-growing major cloud vendor in the world, but that it is growing almost twice as fast as the second-hottest vendor, Google Cloud (28%), and more than twice as fast as all these other world-shaping vendors!

It also means Oracle’s cloud business is growing 3.4X as fast as archrival AWS. And yes, AWS is 5x bigger than Oracle’s cloud business, but do you think Amazon CEO Andy Jassy is telling AWS CEO Adam Selipsky, “Hey, Adam, I got no problem with Oracle’s cloud business growing 3-1/2 times as fast as yours — no sweat. After all, you’re 5x bigger! And heck, when you took over as AWS CEO two years ago, it was 8x bigger! So at this rate, in a few more years we’ll still be 2x as big as Oracle Cloud — like I said, nuthin’ to worry about!”

Yeah, I agree — there’s about 0% chance that’s what Selipsky is hearing from Jassy. Because we can talk all day long about economic uncertainty and “the tough macro” and tighter budgets and drawn-out buying decisions, but the simple fact is that in spite of all that, Oracle’s cloud business is positively booming. And, while the growth rates at AWS and every other Cloud Wars Top 10 are declining, Oracle’s are increasing.

Yes, the Cerner deal, which closed a year ago, is certainly helping, and yes, next quarter the growth rate Oracle reports for its FY24 Q1 is likely to be way down relative to this quarter’s because Cerner will be included in the comparative base for the first time. But in spite of all that, right here and right now the numbers from across Oracle’s cloud business are far superior to what anybody else is posting, which means that Oracle is finding ways to overcome all those “macro” and “uncertainty” objections that are bringing its competitors’ growth numbers gradually downward. Take a look at this excerpt from the Oracle earnings release:

• Q4 Cloud Revenue (IaaS plus SaaS) $4.4 billion, up 54% in USD, up 55% in constant currency
• Q4 Cloud Infrastructure (IaaS) Revenue $1.4 billion, up 76% in USD, up 77% in constant currency
• Q4 Cloud Application (SaaS) Revenue $3.0 billion, up 45% in USD, up 47% in constant currency
• Q4 Fusion Cloud ERP (SaaS) Revenue $0.7 billion, up 26% in USD, up 28% in constant currency
• Q4 NetSuite Cloud ERP (SaaS) Revenue $0.7 billion, up 22% in USD, up 24% in constant currency

Final Thought

In that earnings release, CEO Safra Catz pointed to the big numbers in both cloud infrastructure and cloud apps and optimistically said, “So both of our two strategic cloud businesses are getting bigger — and growing faster. That bodes well for another strong year in FY24.”

And in the white-hot GenAI category, chairman Larry Ellison believes Oracle is ideally positioned:

“Oracle’s Gen2 Cloud has quickly become the number 1 choice for running Generative AI workloads. Why? Because Oracle has the highest-performance and lowest-cost GPU cluster technology in the world. NVIDIA themselves are using our clusters, including one with more than 4,000 GPUs, for their AI infrastructure.”

Slowdown? What slowdown?

Well done, Oracle!