This Just In: Oracle’s Still Not Dead

At BloombergBusinessWeek, Ashlee Vance notes that Oracle ($ORCL) is still alive:

Oracle’s decline into irrelevance was supposed to have started about 20 years ago with the arrival of the MySQL database in 1995.

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The basic idea behind all the Oracle doom and gloom was that no new interesting work would take place on an old database.

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And then, in 2010, Ellison did one of those things that only Ellison seems to be able to do. Oracle bought Sun Microsystems, and antitrust regulators, whom Ellison loves to openly ridicule, approved the deal. Oracle owned the past and the present.

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The weird thing is that Ellison is as rich as ever thanks to Oracle’s ability to withstand a ton of competitive pressure. In the last week the company’s market capitalization rose above that of IBM, one of its major competitors in the database and business software market.

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Of late, though, Oracle has started to demonstrate that it’s thinking more about the future. At the end of May it unveiled something called MySQL Fabric, a response to the NoSQL movement. And on June 10, Ellison is scheduled to show up for the launch of an entirely new database called Oracle Database In-Memory. As the name suggests, this database will make use of techniques currently in vogue that allow huge volumes of data to be stored in high-speed memory instead of on spinning hard disks. The result is that data analysis jobs run at record speed.

These announcements underscore what Oracle has done perhaps better than any other major business software maker, which is make the transition from the old to the new in a highly profitable way.

Last week, Oracle hit a 14-year high of $42.35 per share. The next earnings report should be out in two to three weeks.

Posted by on June 4th, 2014 at 11:32 pm


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