Oracle reverses decline in hardware revenue during Q3

IDG News Service - Oracle's third-quarter revenue rose 4 percent to US$9.3 billion while net income increased 2 percent to $2.6 billion, buoyed by growth in new software licenses and cloud subscriptions as well as a long-anticipated rise in hardware product revenue.

Hardware systems product sales, which had declined steadily since Oracle's acquisition of Sun Microsystems, were up 8 percent to $725 million in the quarter ended Feb. 28, while hardware systems support revenue increased 5 percent to $598 million. New software licenses and cloud subscription revenue rose a combined 4 percent to $2.4 billion.

Software license updates and product support revenue jumped 5 percent to $4.6 billion.

"Oracle Cloud Applications and Engineered Systems are both rapidly growing, billion dollar run-rate businesses," Oracle Chief Financial Officer Safra Catz said in a statement. The company has focused its marketing efforts on such systems, which include the Exadata database machine, while de-emphasizing sales of lower-margin commodity servers.

Oracle's engineered system line is experiencing rapid growth, "while throughout the industry traditional high-end server product lines are in steep decline," Oracle CEO Larry Ellison said in a statement.

Profit margins on engineered systems fell slightly, but that was due to the fact that Oracle is "packing more memory" into the latest models without raising prices, Catz said during a conference call Tuesday. However, Oracle makes significantly more money from the many Oracle software licenses customers load onto the systems than from the hardware itself.

Oracle will cross the 10,000 mark in sales of engineered systems over the next few months, Ellison said during the conference call.

While engineered systems revenue growth has been strong since Oracle launched the first Exadata in 2008, those sales represented a relatively small percentage of total hardware sales until recently, Ellison said. Now, engineered systems account for more than 30 percent of hardware product sales and soon will cover half, he said.

Meanwhile, Oracle's quarterly cloud application revenue "is now approaching $300 million," company President Mark Hurd said in a statement. "All of our strategic Cloud Application Suites, including Fusion Enterprise Resource Planning, Fusion Human Capital Management and Fusion Customer Experience, posted triple-digit revenue growth."

Oracle recently launched release eight of Fusion Applications, which first became generally available in 2011, Hurd said during the call. The release includes some 1,000 new features, and Oracle plans to roll out a similar number in release nine, which is due later this year, he added.

The company is seeing strong growth in "organic Fusion," and not just from the application companies it has acquired more recently, such as Eloqua and Taleo, Hurd added.

While Fusion offers customers the option of both on-premises and cloud deployments, the trend has been "cloud, cloud, cloud," Hurd said.

Cloud subscription contract sizes are growing as well, with more than 65 seven-figure or eight-figure deals in the quarter, according to Hurd.

He chalked up Oracle's SaaS (software as a service) revenue growth to experience.

"We thought we knew a lot a year ago, a couple years ago," Hurd said of Oracle's cloud strategy. "We just know a lot more now."

Oracle is also banking on uptake of its new 12c database. Later this year, the company will release an in-memory option for 12c that it says will provide dramatic performance improvements without the need to rewrite applications. On Tuesday's call, Ellison indicated the release could come within several months.

Oracle is keen to get the in-memory option to market in order to fend off challenges from the likes of SAP, which wants to convince customers now using Oracle's database for their SAP installations to switch over to its HANA in-memory database.

Still in nascent stages are Oracle's entries in IaaS (infrastructure as a service) and PaaS (platform as a service), which will compete with Amazon Web Services and Microsoft Azure, respectively.

Oracle has completed pricing for its IaaS service, and it will be "pretty much equivalent to Amazon," Ellison said. As for PaaS, Oracle expects many customers to "move a lot of their existing applications into Oracle's cloud," he said.

Oracle also plans to have dedicated sales teams for each service, with some 500 to 1,000 hires planned around the world during its next fiscal year, Ellison said. "We need specialist sales teams that are used to competing with Amazon."

Chris Kanaracus covers enterprise software and general technology breaking news for The IDG News Service. Chris' email address is Chris_Kanaracus@idg.com

Reprinted with permission from IDG.net. Story copyright 2014 International Data Group. All rights reserved.

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Major browsers fall during second day at Pwn2Own hacking contest

IDG News Service - Security researchers demonstrated zero-day exploits against Google Chrome, Microsoft Internet Explorer, Apple Safari, Mozilla Firefox and Adobe Flash Player during the second day of the Pwn2Own hacking competition Thursday, racking up total prizes of $450,000.

A team from French vulnerability research firm Vupen hacked Google Chrome by exploiting a use-after-free vulnerability that affects both the WebKit and Blink rendering engines. The researchers then successfully bypassed Chrome's sandbox protection to execute arbitrary code on the underlying system.

On Wednesday, the first day of the contest that takes place every year at the CanSecWest security conference in Vancouver, researchers from the same team hacked Internet Explorer 11, Firefox, Flash Player and Adobe Reader.

Another anonymous researcher presented a Chrome remote code execution exploit Thursday, but the contest judges declared it only a partial win because some details of the hack were similar to those of an exploit presented earlier at Pwnium, Google's own hacking contest that runs aside Pwn2Own.

Well-known iPhone and PlayStation 3 hacker George Hotz, known online as geohot, demonstrated a remote code execution exploit against Firefox, making it the competition's fourth successful hack against Mozilla's browser. Aside from Team Vupen, security researchers Jüri Aedla and Mariusz Mlynski had also compromised Firefox during the first day of the contest by exploiting different vulnerabilities.

On Thursday, researchers Sebastian Apelt and Andreas Schmidt demonstrated a browser-based exploit against Microsoft Internet Explorer that chained together two use-after-free vulnerabilities and a Windows kernel bug to open the Windows calculator application, proving remote code execution.

Another researcher, Liang Chen of the Chinese Keen Team, combined a heap overflow vulnerability with a sandbox bypass to achieve remote code execution through Apple Safari. He and fellow researcher Zeguang Zhou of team 509 then demonstrated a remote code execution exploit for Adobe Flash Player.

All the vulnerabilities exploited during Pwn2Own were shared with the vendors of the affected products.

The prizes won during the second and final day of the competition put the total contest payout to a record $850,000, not including charitable donations or the value of the test laptops won by the researchers after their successful hacks.

During a side challenge dubbed Pwn4Fun, security researchers from Google competed against researchers from Hewlett-Packard's DVLabs Zero Day Initiative (ZDI) who organize the Pwn2Own contest. The Google team hacked Apple Safari and the ZDI team hacked IE11 by combining multiple exploits. The challenge raised $82,500 for the Canadian Red Cross.

Reprinted with permission from IDG.net. Story copyright 2014 International Data Group. All rights reserved.

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Upper Iowa University hosts Independence High School group during college visit tour

Upper Iowa University hosted 17 high school juniors and seniors from Independence, Iowa, on a special week-long Iowa college tour experience.

FAYETTE, Iowa (July 9, 2013) – The Upper Iowa University Office of Admissions hosted 17 high school juniors and seniors from Independence, Iowa, recently as one of the last stops on their Iowa college tour week. The packed week was made possible by a $10,000 grant from Building Directions for Families, a non-profit organization that provides funding for the decategorization of youth in Iowa.

The tour was divided into five segments including stops in Cedar Rapids, Iowa City, Des Moines, Ames, Waterloo, Waverly, Calmar, Decorah and Dubuque.

At Upper Iowa University, President Bill Duffy greeted the group to kick off their visit. It was the first time they had met a college president on any of their stops. Admission counselors treated them to a tour of campus and explained UIU's unique "two-at-a-time" class schedule and opportunities with UIU's Office of Student Development. The students even visited with Pete the Peacock and danced to many of UIU's favorite pep songs.

About Upper Iowa University Founded in 1857, Upper Iowa University is a private, not-for-profit university providing undergraduate and graduate degree programs and leadership development opportunities to some 6,200 students—nationally and internationally—at its Fayette campus and learning centers worldwide. Upper Iowa University is a recognized innovator in offering accredited, quality programs through flexible, multiple delivery systems, including online and independent study. For more information, visit www.uiu.edu.

Contact:
Monica Bayer Heaton
Associate Vice President for Communication and Marketing
Phone 563-425-5773
Cell: 515-291-2070
heatonm@uiu.edu

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First-Generation Students Highlighted During First-Generation Awareness Week

There’s a common misconception about first-generation college students. It’s that they lack motivation, which means they struggle to succeed. But Paige Coleman, a first-generation student at Loyola Marymount University, says that misconception couldn’t be further from the truth.

“I’m even more motivated because I’ve had to overcome a lot just to be at LMU,” said Coleman, a sociology major and a transfer student from Cal State East Bay. “I didn’t have the support from family and friends that other students might have had, but that pushed me to work harder to do what is best for me.”

The First to Go program, an academic resource at LMU, is highlighting Coleman’s story along with the stories of other first-generation students, faculty and staff during First-Generation Awareness Week on April 13 – 18. The week-long event will feature several activities including a student debate, a café showcasing visual and multimedia works and the screening of “Against the Grain,” a film about a first-generation student who attends an elite university.  

Coleman will be participating in Mosaic, an event where members of the LMU community can sit down with a first-generation student, faculty or staff and listen to their story and ask questions about their experience. Each participant will display a quote next to them that best describes their personal story. Coleman chose “Started from the bottom, now I’m here,” based on lyrics from a Drake song. 

“I feel like I really did start from the bottom,” Coleman said. “I didn’t have a lot of resources, but I’m here at LMU. Everyone has been so helpful, and I’ve learned that it’s okay to ask for help.”

La’Tonya Rease Miles, director of the Academic Resource Center and the First to Go program, said that about 22 percent of freshman and 30 percent of transfer students are first-generation college students.  She hopes that the week will show the diversity of the first-generation student population at LMU and challenge any prevailing stereotypes.

“First-generation students are very prideful, highly motivated and add a lot to a campus community,” Rease Miles said. “We really appreciate LMU’s commitment to first-generation students. I’ve haven’t seen this type of support at other institutions.”

For more info about the First to Go program at LMU, go to http://academics.lmu.edu/arc/programswesupport/firsttogocommunity/

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