Oracle’s stock has seen its best day in nearly a year on positive coverage of its cloud business by Barron’s, although some critics are not impressed.
Oracle is the dominant company in the database business, and provides a range of middleware applications. The company has been working to gain a bigger portion of the cloud computing market, with mixed results.
Google Cloud CEO Thomas Kurian, a former Oracle executive, famously called Oracle Cloud “a disgrace.” The company has also faced a lawsuit claiming executives hid issues with Oracle’s ability to compete in the cloud market.
On the other hand, Oracle has scored some significant winsagainst its larger rivals, gaining business from Albertsons, Humana, McDonald’s and Xactly. The company also poached 8×8 from AWS and saw Zoom use Oracle’s Cloud for its latest expansion.
Barron’s featured an articled entitled: “Oracle Is Turning Into a Cloud Giant. Why Its Stock Is a Buy.” The article made the case that Oracle could leverage its existing software and services to help grow its cloud business, potentially becoming the next major cloud player.
As a result of the coverage, Oracle stock rose 5%, it’s biggest single-day gains in nearly a year. Nonetheless, it remains to be seen if Barron’s optimism is warranted. As of 2018, Oracle doesn’t break out its cloud earnings in its quarterly reports, making it hard to judge just how well the company’s cloud business is growing.
CNBC points out that Oracle only reported a 1.9% growth in revenue in its latest report, far short of the estimated 37% growth rate of the cloud market in 2019. Again, without knowing what role Oracle’s cloud business played in its quarterly results, it’s hard to get an accurate read on well its business is doing. At the same time, however, 1.9% is not an encouraging growth rate.