On Friday, Oracle announced a meaningful earnings beat and strong forward guidance on the strength of its license business; and slightly better than expected cloud performance. The stock rose sharply on the day and closed up nearly 16% surpassing $280B in market value. Oracle’s success is due largely to its execution of a highly differentiated strategy that has evolved over the past decade or more; deeply integrating its hardware and software, heavily investing in next generation cloud, creating a homogenous experience across its application portfolio and becoming the number one platform for the world’s most mission critical applications. While investors piled into the stock, skeptics will point to the beat being tilted toward license revenue and investors will likely keep one finger on the sell button until they’re convinced Oracle’s cloud momentum is more consistent and predictable. 

In this Breaking Analysis we’ll review Oracle’s most recent quarter and pull in some ETR survey data to frame the company’s cloud business, the momentum of Fusion ERP, where the company is winning and some gaps/opportunities we see that can be addressed in the coming quarters.