Oracle 2015 Annual Report Download - page 5

Table of Contents
PART I
Item 1. Business
Oracle Corporation provides products and services that address all aspects of corporate information technology (IT) environments—application, platform and
infrastructure. Our Oracle Cloud offerings provide a comprehensive and fully integrated stack of application, platform, compute and storage services in all three
primary layers of the cloud: Software as a Service (SaaS), Platform as a Service (PaaS) and Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS). Our on-premise offerings include
Oracle database and middleware software, application software, hardware (Oracle Engineered Systems, servers, storage, networking and industry-specific
products), and related support and services. We provide our cloud and on-premise offerings to over 400,000 worldwide customers via deployment models that best
suit their needs.
Our comprehensive and fully integrated stack of SaaS, PaaS and IaaS offerings integrate the software, hardware and services on the customers’ behalf in IT
environments that we deploy, support and manage for the customer. Our integrated Oracle Cloud offerings are designed to be rapidly deployable to enable
customers shorter time to innovation; easily maintainable to reduce integration and testing work; connectable among differing deployment models to enable
interchangeability and extendibility between cloud and on-premise IT environments; compatible to easily move workloads between on-premise IT environments
and the Oracle Cloud; cost-effective by requiring lower upfront customer investment; and secure, standards-based and reliable. We are a leader in the core
technologies of cloud IT environments, including database and middleware software as well as enterprise applications, virtualization, clustering, large-scale
systems management and related infrastructure. Our products and services are the building blocks of our Oracle Cloud services, our partners’ cloud services and
our customers’ cloud IT environments.
In addition to providing a broad spectrum of cloud offerings, we develop and sell our products and services to our customers worldwide for use in their global data
centers and on-premise IT environments. An important element of our corporate strategy is to continue our investments in, and innovation with respect to, our
products and services that we offer through our cloud and on-premise software, hardware and services businesses. In fiscal 2016, 2015 and 2014, we invested $5.8
billion, $5.5 billion and $5.2 billion, respectively, in research and development to enhance our existing portfolio of offerings and products and to develop new
technologies and services. We have a deep understanding as to how all components within IT environments—application, platform and infrastructure—interact and
function with one another. We focus our development efforts on improving the performance, security, operation and integration of these differing technologies to
make them more cost-effective and easier to deploy, manage and maintain for our customers and to improve their computing performance relative to our
competitors. After the initial purchase of Oracle products and services, our customers can continue to take advantage of our research and development investments
and deep IT expertise by purchasing and renewing Oracle support offerings, which may include product enhancements that we periodically deliver to our Oracle E-
Business Suite, Siebel, PeopleSoft and JD Edwards application software products, among others, or by renewing their SaaS, PaaS and IaaS contracts with us.
As customers deploy with the Oracle Cloud, many are adopting a hybrid IT model whereby certain of their IT resources are deployed and managed through the
Oracle Cloud, while other of their IT resources are deployed and managed on-premise, and both sets of resources can be managed as one. Our recently introduced
Oracle Cloud at Customer provides an additional deployment model that customers may opt for and utilizes the Oracle Cloud Machine to bring certain Oracle
Cloud PaaS and IaaS offerings to a customer’s on-premise IT environment to meet data sovereignty, data residency, data protection and regulatory business policy
requirements, among others. We focus the engineering of our products and services to best connect different deployment models to enable flexibility, ease, agility,
compatibility, extensibility and seamlessness.
A selective and active acquisition program is another important element of our corporate strategy. We believe our acquisitions enhance the products and services
that we can offer to customers, expand our customer base, provide greater scale to accelerate innovation, grow our revenues and earnings, and increase stockholder
value. In recent years, we have invested billions of dollars to acquire a number of companies, products, services and technologies that add to, are complementary to,
or have otherwise enhanced our existing offerings. We expect to continue to acquire companies, products, services and technologies to further our corporate
strategy.
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