Oracle: Think our DB sales are great now? Wait until we actually get the new product out...

Oracle has capped off a solid fiscal year, and, let's be fair, you can forgive it for boasting that big things are coming for its database line in the coming 12 months.

On Tuesday, Larry Ellison's enterprise tech giant delivered both the Q4 and full year 2018 numbers reports. It also described its new tactic of bundling the cloud and on-prem numbers for both services and licensing, a move it says reflects the convergence of those two parts of the business and initiatives such as the "bring your own license" plan for cloud migration.

Anyway, here are the numbers for the full year, to May 31, 2018:

• Revenues of $39.8bn were up 6 per cent from last year's $37.7bn haul.
• Operating income was $13.7bn, up 8 per cent year-over-year. Thanks to a one-time tax hit Oracle took to repatriate overseas cash, the company's net income was $3.83bn, down 59 per cent from last year.
• Earnings per share were $0.93, down from $2.27 last year (again, the tax hit skewed that number in FY2018.)
• Cloud services and licensing support were around two-thirds of all Oracle's revenues, contributing $26.25bn in 2018. That's up 10 per cent year over year.
• Licensing, both cloud and on-prem, brought in $6.18bn, down 4 per cent from $6.4bn in FY2017. That business accounted for 16 per cent of total revenues.
• Hardware revenues were one tenth of Oracle's haul, bringing in $3.99bn on the year, down 4 per cent from $4.15bn last year.
• Services accounted for $3.4bn in FY2018, up 1 per cent from $3.36bn in 2017 and around 8 per cent of total yearly revenues.

And for the Q4 period, ending May 31:

• Revenues of $11.25bn were up 3 per cent from $10.89bn in the year-ago quarter.
• Net income was $3.4bn, an increase of 5 per cent from $3.23bn in Q4 2017.
• Earnings per share (non-GAAP) of 99 cents beat analyst forecasts of $0.87.
• Cloud service and license support revenues were $6.77bn, up 8 per cent year-over-year.
• Cloud and on-prem licensing revenues were $2.48bn, down 5 per cent from last year's Q4 take of $2.63bn.
• Hardware revenues of $1.11bn were statistically flat from the year-ago quarter. Hardware was around 10 per cent of total revenues in the quarter.
• Services revenue of $883m was down 1 per cent from last year's $894m Q4.

"We had a great fourth quarter with total revenues more than $200 million above our constant currency forecast," said co-CEO, Mark Hurd.

"Our strategic Fusion ERP and HCM SaaS cloud applications suite revenues grew over 50 per cent in the fourth quarter, and we expect continued strong growth from our Fusion SaaS suites throughout FY19."

Oracle execs are also optimistic that database is going to be a big winner for the company in the coming fiscal year. In particular management has high hopes for the much-hyped Autonomous Database line, which has only been officially on the market for a few weeks and is, in practice, still in the trial or proof-of-concept phase with many prospective enterprise customers.

"The key thing for us has been getting our products into the market," Hurd told analysts on the quarterly earnings call.

"They have yet to really start to produce revenue, we are in the very early phase of this."

In the short term, however, investors were not so thrilled. Oracle's predicted $0.68-0.70 EPS for the coming quarter were under analyst forecasts of $0.72, leading shares to drop 3.65 per cent to $44.58 in after-hours trading. ®