What’s Going On Here?Software giant Oracle reported better-than-expected quarterly results earlier this week. What Does This Mean?Oracle knows there’s money in the cloud, so it’s been trying to push more of its existing customers toward its cloud offerings recently. That’s been paying off: demand was up across the software giant’s cloud segment last quarter, including a hefty 36% uptick in its cloud infrastructure business. Overall, Oracle’s cloud revenue was up 19% last quarter versus the same time last year, which helped push overall sales up a better-than-expected 6% – the company’s eighth straight quarter of growth (tweet this).
That’s not the only reason Oracle’s happy: the world’s second-biggest software maker completed its $28 billion purchase of healthcare IT company Cerner last week. The healthcare industry’s been slow to adopt cloud technology, so Oracle will be hoping to benefit this quarter by making inroads in the sector. Investors were on board: they sent Oracle’s stock up 13%. Why Should I Care?The bigger picture: No bang for your buck.
Still, Oracle’s results could’ve been better. It does a lot of business overseas like many of its tech peers, and it needs to convert that foreign revenue back to its home currency. Thing is, Oracle said the dollar’s currently so strong that those conversions cut into its revenue by 5% last quarter, and the currency’s only expected to get stronger as interest rate hikes keep coming. There’s one positive, mind you: analysts reckon economic issues like inflation could end up helping Oracle, as more businesses could head to the cloud in a bid to cut costs.
Zooming out: The cloud’s growing.
Oracle’s rival Salesforce is pushing into new areas of the cloud: it announced last week that it’s launching a cloud-based service for creating and selling NFTs which should be widely available by October. That’s interesting timing: folk might’ve spent $2 billion on NFTs last month, but trading activity has already plunged 90% from its September peak. | 
