Oracle 2010 Annual Report Download - page 9

Table of Contents
Oracle Exalogic Elastic Cloud
Oracle Exalogic Elastic Cloud is an engineered system that combines Oracle Fusion Middleware software with our hardware to more effectively run Java and
non-Java applications and provide customers with an applications platform for cloud computing. Oracle Exalogic Elastic Cloud improves the performance of
applications that run on it and enables customers to consolidate multiple applications onto a single system designed to be scalable, reliable and secure. As an
integrated system, Oracle Exalogic Elastic Cloud simplifies routine maintenance, such as software patching, by providing a single solution that covers the entire
system.
Software Business
Our software business consists of our new software licenses segment and software license updates and product support segment.
New Software Licenses
The new software licenses operating segment of our software business includes the licensing of database and middleware software, as well as applications
software.
Our software solutions are designed to help customers reduce the cost and complexity of their IT infrastructures by delivering solutions via an industry
standards-based, integrated architecture. This standards-based architecture enables our software products to work in customer environments that may include
Oracle or non-Oracle hardware or software components. This approach is designed to support customer choice, reduce customer risk and 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 and to
support a choice of operating systems, including, for example, Oracle Solaris, Oracle Linux, Microsoft Windows and third party UNIX products.
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 26%, 28%, and 31% of total revenues in fiscal 2011, 2010 and 2009, 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 midsize 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 clustered middleware and database servers and storage. These clusters are designed to scale incrementally as required to address our
customers’ IT capacity; satisfy their planning and procurement needs; support their business applications with a standardized platform architecture; 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 each of fiscal 2011, 2010 and
2009.
Database Software
Oracle Database software is the world’s most popular enterprise database software. It is designed to enable the secure storage, retrieval and manipulation of all
forms of data, including transactional data, business information,
5
Source: ORACLE CORP, 10-K, June 28, 2011 Powered by Morningstar® Document Research℠