Oracle 2009 Annual Report Download - page 7

Table of Contents
Our software solutions are designed to help customers reduce the cost and complexity of their information technology (or IT) infrastructures by delivering
solutions via a standards-based, or “open”, integrated architecture, which allows our software products to work in customer environments that may include
Oracle or non-Oracle hardware or software components. This approach supports customer choice, reduces customer risk and can be adapted to the specific needs
of any industry or application. In this model, our database and certain of our middleware offerings are designed to manage and protect a customer’s underlying
business information, while application servers run enterprise applications that are designed to automate multiple business functions and provide intelligence in
critical functional areas. Our software products are designed to operate on both single server and clustered server configurations, which we refer to as “grid”
software, to support a choice of operating systems, including Solaris, Linux, Microsoft Windows and UNIX.
New software license revenues include fees earned from granting customers licenses to use our software products and exclude revenues derived from software
license updates and product support. The standard end user software license agreement for our products generally provides for an initial fee to use the software
product in perpetuity based on a maximum number of processors, named users or other metrics. We also have other types of software license agreements,
including licenses that are restricted by the number of employees, licenses that provide for a limited term and open source licenses. New software license
revenues represented 28%, 31%, and 34% of total revenues in fiscal 2010, 2009 and 2008, respectively.
Database and Middleware Software
Our database and middleware software offerings are designed to provide a cost-effective, high-performance platform for running and managing business
applications for small and mid-size businesses, as well as large, global enterprises. Our customers are increasingly focused on reducing the total cost of their IT
infrastructure and we believe that our software offerings help them achieve this goal. Our software is designed to accommodate demanding, non-stop business
environments, using server, storage and application grids. These grids are designed to scale incrementally as required to address our customers’ IT capacity;
satisfy their planning and procurement needs; support all of their business applications; lower their overall hardware investment; reduce their risk of data loss and
IT infrastructure downtime; and efficiently utilize available IT resources to meet quality of service expectations. New software license revenues from database
and middleware products represented 72% of our new software license revenues in both fiscal 2010 and 2009 and 68% of our new software license revenues in
fiscal 2008.
Database
The Oracle Database is the world’s most popular enterprise database and is designed to enable the secure storage, retrieval and manipulation of all forms of data,
including transactional data, business application data, analytic data, and unstructured data in the form of XML files, office documents, images, video, spatial and
other specialized forms of data such as human genomic and medical data. The Oracle Database is used for a variety of purposes including online transaction
processing, data warehousing, as a document repository or specialized data store and as a database with packaged applications.
The Oracle Database is available in four editions: Express Edition, Standard Edition One, Standard Edition and Enterprise Edition. All editions are built using the
same underlying code, which means that our database software can scale from small, single processor servers to clusters of multi-processor servers. A number of
optional offerings are available with Oracle Database Enterprise Edition to address specific customer requirements in the areas of performance and scalability,
high availability, data security and compliance, data warehousing, information management and systems management. Examples of these options include:
• Oracle Real Application Clusters, which is designed to enable any Oracle Database application to share more efficiently the processing power and
memory capacity of a fault tolerant cluster of servers;
• Oracle Exadata, which is designed to improve database storage and query performance by, among other things, enabling query processing closer to
customer data and reducing required disk space;
• Oracle Advanced Compression, which is designed to enable customers to reduce the amount of disk space required to store all their business
information and improve query performance;
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Source: ORACLE CORP, 10-K, July 01, 2010 Powered by Morningstar® Document Research℠