Thread by @QuinnyPig

It's a bird! It's a plane! It's @oracle's after hours stock price as they announce earnings. The earnings call is in a bit over 20 minutes, and I will livetweet it in this thread as is my tradition.

A trick to reading earnings reports: they always, always, always lead with good news. The more esoteric the things they're talking about, the worse the news.

The fact that the headline starts with "Fusion ERP cloud revenue" says a lot, since nobody knows what that is.

"Total quarterly revenues were $10.4 billion, down 6% YoY and down 4% in constant currency compared to Q4 last year." So it's a revenue hit.

Credit where due, there *IS* a pandemic on.

It's hard to make 1% growth in "Cloud Plus Some Other Things We Shove Under That Category" look good.

"Cloud services and license support revenues were $6.8 billion, up 1% YoY and 3% in constant currency. "

"Cloud license and on-premise license revenues were $2.0 billion. "

There's no YoY number there there. Uh oh.

@jordannovet says... down 22%. Ouch.

Highlighting Zoom, which we know about, and @8x8 as customer wins.

This is interesting to me because of what it's not-- it's not a Database deal leveraged for cloud. It's a pure @oraclecloud play as best I can tell. That's a big deal.

You can handwave away "has a bunch of Oracle databases and bought some cloud in return for favorable terms."

"We had this workload on @awscloud and now it's on @oraclecloud for massive cost savings" is quite another story.

And now we wait for the call to begin.

Larry Ellison and Safra Catz are the @oracle executives on the call.

"@oraclecloud is a serious alternative to @awscloud and @azure," snubbing the hell out of @gcpcloud.

$1.6 billion last year in CapEx. That's... a disturbingly low number for a serious cloud buildout.

Nearly $5.2 billion in share repurchases. You're telling me that rather than investing that in @OracleCloud buildouts, you thought it better to just... give it back to the shareholders?

I think we disagree on something fundamental here, Oracle.

"Our growing businesses are now larger than our declining businesses."

Um, yes. Left to their own devices, a thing that grows will eventually eclipse a thing that shrinks. That is how size works.

Talking about wins of ERP workloads. They've got a decent shot; ERP customers are almost universally Oracle customers.

I dream bigger; I want to see @OracleCloud pull a brand refresh and become something serious for more cloud native shops.

"If you talk to Gartner, Forrester, IDC--you'll see @Oracle in the upper right of every chart" because those companies know where their bread is buttered.

Good god, Gartner put Cisco WebEx ahead of Zoom!

Now Larry wants to talk about why they're winning.

"The world's only second generation autonomous cloud."

Wrong.

"Your data transfer pricing is fair and transparent" is the real answer here.

"With autonomous cloud, there's nothing for humans to learn, and nothing for humans to do." Jesus man, do you hear yourself?

"All of the @oraclecloud services: Compute. Storage. Etc. Will be serverless!"

I like the Etc. category the most.

"In Oracle's Autonomous Cloud, if you don't use it, you don't have to pay for it."

Uh... buddy.

Go spin up a Wordpress site in any cloud provider, then come talk to me.

Now talking about the @zoom_us deal.

"Within hours of the first Oracle deployment, @OracleCloud supported hundreds of thousands of simultaneous meeting participants."

That sounds right and I want to believe it but... see Larry's previous comments.

"Look at @8x8. Great example of our sales process. Some services moved to @oraclecloud; they were surprised by moving from @awscloud to OCI; it was more performant and cheaper, so they decided to move all of their services over."

Talking about a bunch of other customer wins, but they're all very @oracle database centric customers. This is a segment that, in the fullness of time, is in decline.

It's not where @oraclecloud's future is; it's the past. There's a better way here.

What I would do:
1. Drop the Oracle name. It's easier than rehabilitating the brand.
2. Put Larry out to sea on an ice floe.
3. Drop a team of researchers on top of @zoom_us and @8x8 to understand what's working, what's not.
4. Hurl money into CapEx.
5. It's storytelling time!

Now talking about Fusion ERP and similar. This is where Larry dunks on @SAP, a company that the customers he should be courting have barely heard of.

This is like watching my grandpa try to beat the crap out of your grandpa. You just kinda feel sorry for everyone.

"We're the best. Don't take my word for it, go read the @gartner_inc report!"

How about instead I spin up an account and kick the tires myself? Oh, right; these are financial analysts. That's like Boeing telling them to go fly the planes themselves, isn't it.

Zoom and 8x8 referenced by an analyst (we're into Q&A now) as "wins outside your typical customer base."

YES! That's "the future" you're staring at. The question is, will @oraclecloud capture it, or let it slip away?

Larry: "OCI is better than other clouds."

Ehhhhh... I would not frame it that way. The pricing? Yes. The pricing TRANSPARENCY? By a landslide.

But clouds aren't just "during a demo" capability stories. Reputations are built over years.

Oh god. "Now that we got the autonomous database working in the public cloud, now it's available to on-premise customers."

Uh... if you can run "the thing in your cloud" onsite on customer equipment, I have some questions for you.

He keeps talking about "Gen 2" @oraclecloud, and I keep hearing "Gentoo."

I talk a lot of smack about @Oracle, but check out this @OracleCloud data transfer pricing.

And here's some of @awscloud's data transfer pricing for the sake of comparison.

But let's be fair. Nestled at the bottom of the @awscloud EC2 on-demand pricing page (how... intuitive) we see this gem.

I don't doubt that @awscloud data transfer can be competitive--but I don't have to hit half a petabyte before I find out with @oraclecloud.

And so ends the @Oracle earnings call without further disaster. $ORCL appears to be recovering in the after hours.