The Oracle Translation Engine: Deciphering Earnings Call Doublespeak

The Oracle Translation Engine: Deciphering Earnings Call Doublespeak

In case you missed it, Oracle missed their Wall Street numbers last week. This bad news from Redwood Shores led to some frantic hand-waving on the part of CEO Larry Ellison, CFO Safra Catz and President Mark Hurd. As you might expect, there was plenty of public company executive doublespeak to go around.

Fortunately, I’m here to translate. So I brushed off my snark machine and took a closer look at some of Oracle’s key pronouncements:

Oracle said: “Despite the lackluster quarter, Oracle’s outlook for the next quarter is in line with Wall Street expectations.”

Translation: We’ve been doing whatever we can to lower Wall Street expectations.

Oracle said: “Our last major software acquisition was more than five years ago.”

Translation: We spent tons of money during the 2000s acquiring our way to a SOA Suite that ended up emulating Dr. Frankenstein: buy a bunch of parts and hope for lightning.

Oracle said: “Our success in the cloud is significant and undeniable.”

Translation: We’re achieving modest success convincing companies the managed hosting we’re hawking is actually Cloud.

Oracle said: “Some of SAP’s largest customers bought Exadata, not HANA.”

Translation: HANA sucks even worse than Exadata.

Oracle said: “Virtually all of [our new sales team hires] will go to our cloud businesses.”

Translation: There’s no sense assigning them to selling our older products. No one could sell that sh*t.

Oracle said: “Oracle database and Java are the two most important platforms on the face of the Earth for building applications.”

Translation: It’s really important to Oracle’s bottom line that customers still buy our ancient, Cloud-unfriendly database and our ancient, Web-unfriendly programming environment.

Oracle said: “We think our PaaS business is one of our huge competitive advantages.”

Translation: Paying as you go for our Java tools in a managed hosting environment is PaaS. No really, it’s PaaS. Please believe us!

Oracle said: “We don’t think any of the cloud players can compete with us at the platform layer.”

Translation: Amazon wouldn’t be caught dead selling the heavyweight crap we’ve been unloading on customers for years.

Oracle said: “When someone chooses an Oracle application in the cloud versus an Oracle application on-premise, we make more money over time.”

Translation: Our customers will never save money by buying our supposed Cloud-based offerings. They’ll only end up paying us more.

Oracle said: “We just don’t lose deals.”

Translation: We’ve been losing customers at a fast clip. Please don’t notice.

Share the Post:
XDR solutions

The Benefits of Using XDR Solutions

Cybercriminals constantly adapt their strategies, developing newer, more powerful, and intelligent ways to attack your network. Since security professionals must innovate as well, more conventional endpoint detection solutions have evolved

AI is revolutionizing fraud detection

How AI is Revolutionizing Fraud Detection

Artificial intelligence – commonly known as AI – means a form of technology with multiple uses. As a result, it has become extremely valuable to a number of businesses across

AI innovation

Companies Leading AI Innovation in 2023

Artificial intelligence (AI) has been transforming industries and revolutionizing business operations. AI’s potential to enhance efficiency and productivity has become crucial to many businesses. As we move into 2023, several

data fivetran pricing

Fivetran Pricing Explained

One of the biggest trends of the 21st century is the massive surge in analytics. Analytics is the process of utilizing data to drive future decision-making. With so much of

kubernetes logging

Kubernetes Logging: What You Need to Know

Kubernetes from Google is one of the most popular open-source and free container management solutions made to make managing and deploying applications easier. It has a solid architecture that makes

ransomware cyber attack

Why Is Ransomware Such a Major Threat?

One of the most significant cyber threats faced by modern organizations is a ransomware attack. Ransomware attacks have grown in both sophistication and frequency over the past few years, forcing

data dictionary

Tools You Need to Make a Data Dictionary

Data dictionaries are crucial for organizations of all sizes that deal with large amounts of data. they are centralized repositories of all the data in organizations, including metadata such as