Oracle Takes A Fall

Oracle posted fiscal fourth-quarter results that were just horrible for investors looking for more progress in web-based services, sending its shares lower.

The company had been expected to report a pickup in its software business and progress in cloud computing, shares of Oracle had gained 10 percent over the past three months. However yesterday it was clear that Oracle is getting a kicking from the competition like Salesforce.com and Workday which have been offering competitive software and Internet-based products at prices that often undercut Oracle.

Tech spending is likely to fall as more companies move to the cloud. Oracle has been rolling out its own cloud-based products but they remain under five percent of its overall revenue. For the fiscal first quarter, Oracle expects software and cloud revenue to grow between 6 percent and 8 percent. That forecast includes expectations for software- and platform-related cloud services to grow between 25 percent and 35 percent.

Oracle said it expects its hardware system revenue to be in a range of down 1 percent to up 3 percent.

For its latest fourth quarter, Oracle said overall revenue rose 3 percent to $11.3 billion. That was less than the $11.48 billion analysts had expected on average. Net income fell 4 percent to $3.6 billion.

Revenue from Oracle’s hardware systems products grew 2 percent to $870 million.

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Cheaper Windows Phones Forthcoming

Lower priced smartphones running Microsoft’s Windows Phone operating system are on the way, according to Microsoft.

Speaking at the Computex trade show in Taipei, Microsoft’s Nick Parker, who handles the company’s partnerships with device makers, said the new handsets could be out by the end of the year.

Compared to current models, which are in the “fours, fives and sixes,” he said referring to prices between $400 and $699, the new phones would have price points in the “ones, twos and threes.”

Asked to clarify if he was referring to end-market prices without carrier subsidies, Parker said he was.

He didn’t identify the manufacturers that would be bringing the phones to market, but there’s a good chance they are among nine companies Microsoft signed up to its Windows Phone development program earlier this year.

In addition to existing partners Nokia, Samsung, HTC and Huawei, Microsoft added Foxconn, Gionee, Lava (Xolo), Lenovo, LG, Longcheer, JSR, Karbonn and ZTE.

Some of the new partners have significant market share in developing countries where phones generally have lower prices than in developed markets.

Microsoft launched the latest version of its Windows Phone operating system, Windows Phone 8, in late 2012 to critical praise. The operating system was slow to catch on with consumers though, perhaps due to the absence of several popular apps on the platform, but has been slowly increasing its market share.

Windows Phone had a 3 percent share of the smartphone market in the fourth quarter of 2013, up from 2.6 percent in the last three months of 2012, according to IDC. In contrast, Google’s Android dominated the smartphone market at the end of 2013 with a 78.1 percent share. Apple’s iOS was in second place at 17.6 percent.

IDC forecasts Windows Phone will continue to increase its market share to hit 7 percent in 2018.

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Oracle Updates NoSQL

Oracle has announced the availability of the latest edition of its NoSQL datatabase.

NoSQL is Oracle’s distributed key-value database. Now in it’s third version, the enhancements this time are heavily centred around security and business continuity.

Oracle NoSQL 3.0 features improvements in security with cluster-wide password based user authentication and integration with Oracle Wallet. Session level Secure Socket Layer (SSL) encryption and network port restriction are also included.

For disaster recovery and prevention, there’s automatic fail-over to metro-area secondary data centres, while secondary server zones can be used to offload read-only workloads to take the pressure off primary servers under stress.

For developers, there is added support for tabular data models that Oracle claims will simplify application design and improve integration with SQL based applications, while secondary indexing improves query performance.

“Oracle NoSQL 3.0 helps organisations fill the gap in skills, security and performance by delivering […] enterprise-class NoSQL database that empowers database developers and DBAs to easily, intuitively and securely build and deploy next generation applications,” said Oracle’s EVP of Database Server Technologies, Andrew Mendelsohn.

It’s already been a big week for the SQL community with NoSQL arriving on MariaDB for the first time, courtesy of a tie-up between SkySQL, Google and IBM on Tuesday, while yesterday Fusion-IO announced the use of Non-volatile memory (NVM) compression in MySQL to increase the capacity of SSD storage.

Both the community and enterprise versions of Oracle NoSQL Database 3.0 are available for download now from the Oracle Technology Network.

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