Oracle Corporation (ORCL) Earnings Call Transcript & Summary

Good morning. My name is Audra, and I will be your conference operator today. At this time, I would like to welcome everyone to the Oracle's AI Changes Everything Conference Call. Today's conference is being recorded. [Operator Instructions] At this time, I would like to turn the conference over to Ken Bond, Senior Vice President, Investor Relations. Please go ahead.

Thank you, Audra. Good morning, everyone, and thank you for joining us on short notice. On the call today, our Chairman and Chief Technology Officer, Larry Ellison; Executive Vice Chairman, Safra Catz; Chief Executive Officer, Clay Magouyrk; and Chief Executive Officer, Mike Sicilia. As a reminder, today's discussion may include forward-looking statements or other information that might be considered forward-looking. As a reminder to you all, forward-looking statements are subject to risks and uncertainties that may cause actual results to differ materially from statements being made today. As a result, we caution you against placing undue reliance on these forward-looking statements. Before we take questions, we'll begin with a few prepared remarks. With that, I'd like to turn the call over to Safra.

Hello, everyone. We wanted to share our thoughts about this morning's news. Our tagline is AI Changes Everything. And we've taken that to heart ourselves. The company is being recognized as an innovator and leader in AI, and our momentum has been nothing less than spectacular, and it's only the beginning. With this success in mind, Larry and I thought timing was perfect to recognize and promote several executives who have not only been instrumental in helping pivot the company but who will be critical to leading us as we move forward. Larry will continue to lead Oracle and bring the vision and business acumen that has made us so successful for nearly 50 years. That part is not changing. We're promoting Clay and Mike to the position of CEO. You'll hear more from these guys today each -- of each has been instrumental in various parts of the company, and they are ready for more responsibility. In addition, Doug Kehring will be assuming the duties of Principal Financial Officer. Doug has worked with me at Oracle for 25 years and is very familiar with all aspects of our business. And Mark Hura is being promoted to President as he has been the customer-focused engine behind much of our accelerating revenue, including the unprecedented growth of OCI. As for myself, I'll be Executive Vice Chairman and continue to work with the team and with our customers. These are incredibly exciting times and personally, I am thrilled. I'll see many of you at AI world in a few weeks. And with that, let me hand off to Larry.

Thank you, Safra. Well, Safra and I have been running Oracle together for just about 26 years. It's been a long, productive enjoyable gratifying part of my life. And I think we've done a pretty good job creating an important technologies and database applications and now our Gen2 cloud. Along the way, the team here at Oracle created hundreds of billions of dollars of value for our shareholders. But now Oracle is entering the AI era. I've never seen an opportunity on this scale before. The immense impact of AI across our economy is hard to grasp. The colossal size of the AI endeavor and the size of the responsibility that goes with it, it's difficult to imagine. But Oracle's job is not to imagine gigawatt scale data centers. Oracle's job is to build them. Clay and Mike are proven successful leaders prepared and experienced in pursuing AI opportunities. I'm looking forward to working with Clay, Mike and Safra, over the coming years to develop AI technology and enable our customers to use large language models with their private data. By doing that, Oracle will make it easy for all of our customers to use AI to solve their most important problems. Join us at AI World next month and watch us demonstrate Oracle's revolutionary new technology that enables large language models to securely access private corporate data on to you, Clay.

Thank you, Larry. I've spent the past decade at Oracle, building Oracle Cloud Infrastructure. This has been the opportunity of my lifetime, and none of that was possible without the tireless support and guidance of Safra. Oracle Cloud Infrastructure has entered a phase of hyper growth powered by AI and the rapid adoption of our cloud by Oracle's diverse set of enterprise customers. Our infrastructure is so flexible that we can provide our entire cloud, 100% of our cloud services into individual customer data centers. We are the only cloud provider that can embed our cloud into our partners' clouds, providing the full suite of our data platform to all cloud customers everywhere. And we are also building the largest AI clusters to meet the ever-expanding demands for AI training and inferencing. Our new Gen AI data platform brings together the best of Oracle's database, analytics and AI technology to do what we've always done for customers, help them make sense of their most valuable data. Working with Mike to power the most complete suite of horizontal and industry applications has been great fun so far, and I'm excited for what comes next. Over to you, Mike.

Thank you, Clay. For 68 quarters, I have had the privilege of watching Safra lead with a steady hand unmatched clarity and exceptional financial stewardship. I am deeply grateful for all that she has done for our customers, our shareholders and our employees. Oracle has evolved from a technology provider to a strategic partner because of the depth and breadth of our offerings. These technologies enable entirely new business models and open entirely new competitive opportunities. I've been engaged with our customers across a wide range of industries, from banking to health care, to communications and many more. Our customers are increasingly interested in and seeing value in all of our offerings, from industry applications, to Fusion, to OCI, to database and to our AI data platform. As we help businesses transform, this also creates much bigger deals that are multiple times larger than what we experienced in the past. We're off to a strong start in Q2, and I look forward to working with Clay to build upon our momentum. Back to you, Ken.

Thanks, Mike. Audra, could you please poll the audience for questions?

We will now begin the question-and-answer session. [Operator Instructions] we'll go first to John DiFucci at Guggenheim Securities.

Well, it's been a busy month for the Oracle team. But I realized the announcements this months are the culmination of years or even decades of both technology and human development. I can't help, though, right now to open up with some comments about Safra, who I've known and admired for decades, and it's evident by these four promotions today, what you've meant to Oracle and to shareholders. We know that Larry has been deeply involved as CTO in the development of OCI and applications, all the technology of Oracle. I guess my question is, while you've put your daily duties at Oracle in more than capable hands, as Executive Vice Chairman, should we assume that you'll still be somewhat involved in Oracle operations perhaps more so than if your new title didn't have the word executive before it? And just -- and finally, congrats to Clay, Mike, Mark and Doug, all of whom, I've either known well or have heard to be great leaders in your areas.

John, thank you. Of course, I mean Oracle Red runs through my blood. And I'll be working with all the teams. In fact, I mean, the process right now of talking with customers and also introducing them to Clay and Mike if they don't know them already. And of course, I'll continue to work with Doug and the Board and, of course, Larry. And so I'm still here, and I'm an employee and I'm really looking forward to this stage. But it is absolutely time. You want to make a transition like this when things are great. And when I'm handing it to two of the guys actually a whole team that have brought Oracle here, this is really -- this is ideal. So thank you, and thanks, John.

We'll move next to Brad Zelnick at Deutsche Bank.

Congrats everyone in their new roles. Safra, it's been a pleasure working with you all these years. And I know you'll still be around, but you're a leader among leaders and your impact will endure not only for Oracle, but the entire industry. And I'm a little sad because while I know you're -- we're left in very capable hands, no one quite does it the way you do. And for that, I say thank you. To my question, I actually have two questions. Safra, we've all known this day would eventually come but the timing is always a surprise, and you've already spoken to this a bit, but just why now, why is today the right day? And my follow-up for you, Safra, and for the team, as we think about the new co-CEO structure, I've always assumed Oracle's next CEO would be product focused. And when I think back to the vertical app strategy, which I remember back to Retek, even Primavera, where Mike came from, I always appreciated how vertical apps were so important for being integral to your customers' most mission-critical business processes. But fast forward to today, as we think about Mike and Clay's roles coming together, can you talk about the magic of how these worlds drive even greater customer commitment from vertical and horizontal apps, all the way down to the infrastructure layer?

Okay. I'm not going to dominate this call other than to say it really is the perfect time, and they are the ideal partners because Mike is responsible for a lot of the software stack and Clay is the -- is cloud infrastructure, and this is really a match made in heaven to have two technical executives work together to meet the needs of our customers. And with that, I'm going to hand off to Larry to complete the answer.

Well, okay, I'm going to hand it off to Clay and Mike to complete the answer.

It's Mike. I'll be happy to share some thoughts. Thanks for the question Brad. I think Larry mentioned on the last earnings call, the inferencing market and how important it is and how big it is to Oracle. And if you think about a lot of the mission-critical data that's going to be very important to inferencing, not part of the public Internet, not been foundational in trading large language models. We at Oracle are the custodian and the partner to our customers for that mission-critical data, be it back office data, be it health care EHR data, be it retail merchandising data. You know the story, Brad, you've heard it many times. And I think that puts us in a very unique position in that market. It also puts us in a very unique position to deliver end-to-end industry cloud suites. And we're not just thinking about this from a product standpoint, but also with how we engage with our customers. And that's one of the reasons you heard about Mark being promoted. We're streamlining our go-to-market as well to make sure that we're positioning these end-to-end suites, which are unmatched in the industry. There's no other company in the world that has the OCI business, the horizontal applications business, the industries business, the analytics on top of it, the inferencing business, retrieval augmented generation, all in one package. And we need to make sure that when we're talking with our customers, we're engaged at the highest level. So we've made changes not just at our product level, but also with how we engage with our customers. The other thing I think is becoming apparent to us is that it's not just about selling and delivering this to enterprises. It's actually about opening up new ecosystems. And I'll give you a quick example. I mentioned in my opening remarks, the banking industry and the health care industry. And one question might be, well, what do they have to do with one another? Well, banks loan a lot of money, as you know, to health care organizations, but they do so with very poor telemetry into the receivables in an industry, at least in the United States, that is notoriously plagued by cash flow problems. If you look at the publicly reported earnings reports of major health care institutions, they talk about days of cash on hand, not weeks, not months, not years. And this has caused a rather, shall we say, not ideal relationship for their liquidity and lending partners. When we talk about an ecosystem, an AI-based ecosystem, banks can have a view into the health care organization's leading indicators, not just for payment, not just for quantitative but qualitative issues as well. So if you have your hip replaced and you're then readmitted to the emergency room, 30 days or 60 days offer and you're [indiscernible] and you're a Medicare patient and value-based reimbursements, that changes the amount of the reimbursable. So if you think about that at scale over large health care institutions, think about the relationship -- changing relationships between banks and health care organizations. Yes, we're a major supplier to both verticals with end-to-end cloud solutions, but actually connecting them I think, is unique to the Oracle AI advantage. It's unique to the amount of operational data, the amount of back-office data. And of course, all of the infrastructure that Clay has built makes it possible. And with that, Clay, I'll turn it over to you for additional comments.

Yes. So Brad, in addition to, I think, what you just heard Mike talk about the synergies between the different applications, the same is true between our infrastructure and the applications themselves. The fact that we can deploy Oracle Cloud infrastructure all over the world, the fact that we have access to the latest and greatest AI models, whether it be Grok or whether it be Gemini, whether it be Cohere or other partnerships, models like Llama, being able to offer those through our Gen AI service and then be able to take advantage of that inside the applications themselves. It's -- then, of course, the fact that we have the Oracle database and the world's best database services that run on top of that compute and storage and networking infrastructure. And then you get to layer the applications on top. It really is more -- the whole is more than the sum of the parts. And I think that's true even within our infrastructure, the fact that our database services can then provide more and more value to the applications and then the fact that the applications themselves become more valuable when you can take advantage of multiples of those together. That really is the true strength of Oracle. We are the only company that can do both infrastructure and applications.

And we'll take our final question today from Mark Moerdler at Bernstein Research.

Clay, Mike, that was great answer. So thank you for sharing that color. Obviously, we can get a lot more as we move forward in the year. I want to add to what my peers have just said. Safra, I really want to congratulate you on how much you've accomplished and such a pleasure it's been working with you and hopefully, continuing to. It's truly amazing how much you've changed the business from on-premise to cloud truly at hyperspeed. So congrats. I also want to obviously congratulate Clay and Mike. I don't think there are two other people so well positioned to take on this responsibility. So my question is, there's a lot of news flow and a lot of rumbling about additional large deals. And from a sense from the earnings calls, there's a lot more going on. Is there any color you can give on how to think about the upside in the future here?

This is Clay. Yes, here's what I would say. We see very strong demand across the entire base. We're not here to talk about any specific deal. But when you think about the way in which the AI infrastructure space is growing. There are many, many customers, some very, very large, some only large. And OCI is quickly becoming a place that those customers turn to for both their training and inferencing needs. And so yes, we see continued demand from existing customers and new customers. And we spend a lot of our time working to say yes to those customers and give them the infrastructure they need as quickly as possible.

One color -- I'll add just add -- On the last earnings call, we mentioned that we expected more large deals, and we still feel that way. And certainly, look forward to expanding on that at the Financial Analyst Day as we can at AI World in just a few weeks.

Thank you Mike. A replay of this call will be made available on the Investor Relations website. Should you have any questions, please contact Investor Relations. And with that, let me turn the call back to Audra for closing.

Thank you. And this concludes today's conference call. We thank you for your participation. You may now disconnect.