Oversize #04: The resilience of Oracle

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Editor's note: For a while, Oracle had the typical big-tech problem—often late to the market, too comfortable with the traditional enterprise business and large, bureaucratic setups. Amazon, Google, a resurgent Microsoft and a host of new cloud and software-as-a-service companies flooded the market. In the first issue of Oversize, I wrote about IBM’s similar conundrums. That said, Oracle has now posted double-digit growth in constant currency earnings per share for the third year in a row. Results for the fourth quarter, which ended 31 May 2020, were mixed as customers in industries impacted by the COVID-19 pandemic, such as hospitality and retail, postponed purchases, but the company did manage to snag a few notable cloud infrastructure customer wins, including 8x8 and Zoom. So how is it that Oracle, a legacy tech company if there’s any, is able to keep growing? When it comes to cloud tech today, you essentially have three markets. The first is “infrastructure-as-a-service”, or IaaS, what you would generally think of when you hear “cloud computing”; essentially, this is renting out computing power, storage space, etc., the basic infrastructure. …