Newcomers threaten Oracle's reign in software

If there was a constant in Silicon Valley over the last ten years, was virtually continuous profit growth of Oracle Corp. This is over.
Oracle, with its $ 32.7 billion in revenue, is still a dominant force in technology thanks to its databases and other applications that companies use to manage purchases and finances. Today, however, your business is being eroded gradually by smaller firms that offer newest technologies in specific niches.
The company, which is headquartered in California and whose actions gave a return three times greater than the overall market in the last 10 years, announced on Wednesday that its revenue from new licenses and software subscriptions fell 2% in the third fiscal quarter, for $ 2.3 billion. The next day, the price of its action fell 9.7% to $ 32,30, the biggest fall since December 2011, and then another 1 percent on Friday, closing at $ 31,98.
Safra Catz, CFO and codiretora-Oracle's Superintendent, attributed the drop in sales in the quarter to own misconceptions of the Oracle and not to demand for the company's products.
But Peter Goldmacher, who follows technology companies in the investment management firm Cowen and co., says that "there is a bigger problem here" that the slide in the period. He notes that Oracle has had three disappointing quarters in the past two years. Oracle still gives the letters at its base already established, but "new companies are offering best functions or similar for a better price," he said.
Oracle, which was founded in 1977 by its CEO Larry Ellison and others, remains a leader in database sales. But the software market for the so-called "big data" (large volumes of processed data at high speeds) is growing three times faster than the market in General.
This sector must jump almost 150% over the next five years, compared with 40% for the global database market, estimates David Floyer, a founder of Wikibon research community.
Companies are also beginning to believe they don't need to spend so much on technology. Even the largest of them are migrating to cloud-based technologies.
Dave Corchado, Director of information technology of the digital marketing agency iCrossing Inc., Oracle's client, says its new spending are now going to Oracle's competitors such as Amazon.com Inc. The iCrossing uses Amazon to computational capacity and analytical software free Hadoop. Spending on Oracle databases "are intentionally at the same level," he says.
Already Manish Kapoor, Director of it, NuStar Energy Corp., says his company has decided to move away from products of Oracle database for reasons of cost.
"Database is now a commodity for which there is strong competition," he said.
When the giant health plans Aetna Inc. began searching for a technology to analyze data on its 18 million customers, she resorted to established companies like Oracle.
Michael Palmer, Director of innovation of Aetna, said that the established companies are too slow and that beginners as the GNS Healthcare are more apt to "speed things up".
Software companies in the cloud, as the Workday Inc. and Salesforce Inc., offer internet-based software that compete with Oracle and can cost a lot less than some of its most important products. But Oracle was not alien to new technologies and trends. Since October 2011, acquired companies in the cloud computing RightNow Technologies Inc., Taleo Corp. and Eloqua Inc. for a total of more than $ 4.3 billion.
Customers of these firms, however, tend to come more of marketing than of technology companies and are more willing to build a relationship with a company of independent cloud computing than with Oracle, which has a reputation for being tough in negotiations, says Rebecca Wettemann, an analyst with Nucleus Research Inc.
Oracle was the pioneer of relational databases, which store data in rows and columns, and has been dominating this area for about 30 years. But, today, a new type of database, known as NoSQL and used, for example, by Facebook Inc., stores and facilitates the analysis of vast amounts of data at a much lower cost.