Business Description - ORCL

Item 1.

Business

Oracle provides products and services that address enterprise information technology (IT) environments. Our products and services include applications and infrastructure offerings that are delivered worldwide through a variety of flexible and interoperable IT deployment models. These models include on-premise deployments, cloud-based deployments, and hybrid deployments (an approach that combines both on-premise and cloud-based deployment) such as our Oracle Cloud at Customer offering (an instance of Oracle Cloud in a customer's own data center). Accordingly, we offer choice and flexibility to our customers and facilitate the product, service and deployment combinations that best suit our customers' needs. Our customers include businesses of many sizes, government agencies, educational institutions and resellers that we market and sell to directly through our worldwide sales force and indirectly through the Oracle Partner Network.

Oracle Cloud Software-as-a-Service and Infrastructure-as-a-Service (SaaS and IaaS, respectively, and collectively, Oracle Cloud Services) offerings provide a comprehensive and integrated stack of applications and infrastructure services delivered via a cloud-based deployment model. Oracle Cloud Services integrate the software, hardware and services on a customer's behalf in a cloud-based IT environment that Oracle deploys, upgrades, supports and manages for the customer. Oracle Cloud Services are designed to be rapidly deployable to enable customers shorter time to innovation; intuitive for casual and experienced users; easily maintainable to reduce upgrade, integration and testing work; connectable among differing deployment models to enable interchangeability and extendibility between IT environments; compatible to easily move workloads between the Oracle Cloud and other IT environments; cost-effective by requiring lower upfront customer investment; and secure, standards-based and reliable.

Oracle cloud license and on-premise license deployment offerings include Oracle Applications, Oracle Database and Oracle Middleware software offerings, among others, which customers deploy using IT infrastructure from the Oracle Cloud or their own cloud-based or on-premise IT environments. Substantially all customers, at their option, purchase license support contracts when they purchase an Oracle license.

Oracle hardware product offerings include Oracle Engineered Systems, servers, storage and industry-specific products, among others, and customers generally opt to purchase hardware support contracts when they purchase Oracle hardware.

Oracle also offers services to assist our customers and partners to maximize the performance of their Oracle purchases.

Providing choice and flexibility to Oracle customers as to when and how they deploy Oracle applications and infrastructure technologies is an important element of our corporate strategy. We believe that offering customers broad, comprehensive, flexible and interoperable deployment models for Oracle applications and infrastructure technologies is important to our growth strategy and better addresses customer needs relative to our competitors, many of whom provide fewer offerings and more restrictive deployment models.

Our investments in, and innovation with respect to, Oracle products and services that we offer through our cloud and license, hardware and services businesses (described further below) are another important element of our corporate strategy. In fiscal 2019, 2018 and 2017, we invested $6.0 billion, $6.1 billion and $6.2 billion, respectively, in research and development to enhance our existing portfolio of offerings and products and to develop new technologies and services. We have a deep understanding as to how applications and infrastructure technologies interact and function with one another. We focus our development efforts on improving the performance, security, operation and integration of our technologies to improve the computing performance of our products and services relative to our competitors' offerings, to be more cost-effective, and to be easier for customers to deploy, manage and maintain. For example, we believe that Oracle applications and platform technologies, such as the Oracle Database, when combined with other Oracle infrastructure technologies deliver improved performance at a lower cost relative to competing infrastructure technologies and provide customers flexibility through a choice of cloud-based and on-premise deployment models. After the initial purchase of Oracle products and services, our customers can continue to benefit from our research and development efforts and deep IT expertise by electing to purchase and renew Oracle support offerings for their license and hardware deployments, which may include product enhancements that we periodically deliver to our products, and by renewing their Oracle Cloud Services contracts with us.

Index to Financial Statements

Our selective and active acquisition program is another important element of our corporate strategy. We believe that our acquisitions enhance the products and services that we can offer to customers, expand our customer base, provide greater scale to accelerate innovation, grow our revenues and earnings, and increase stockholder value. In recent years, we have collectively invested billions of dollars to acquire a number of companies, products, services and technologies that add to, are complementary to, or have otherwise enhanced our existing offerings. We expect to continue to acquire companies, products, services and technologies to further our corporate strategy.

We have three businesses:

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our cloud and license business, which is comprised of a single operating segment and includes our Oracle Cloud Services offerings, cloud license and on-premise license offerings, and license support offerings, represented 83%, 81% and 80% of our total revenues in fiscal 2019, 2018 and 2017, respectively;

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our hardware business, which is comprised of a single operating segment and includes our hardware products and related hardware support services offerings, represented 9%, 10% and 11% of our total revenues in fiscal 2019, 2018 and 2017, respectively; and

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our services business, which is comprised of a single operating segment, represented 8% of our total revenues in fiscal 2019 and 9% of our total revenues in each of fiscal 2018 and 2017.

Management's Discussion and Analysis of Financial Condition and Results of Operations and Note 15 of Notes to Consolidated Financial Statements, both included elsewhere in this Annual Report, provide additional information related to our businesses and operating segments.

Oracle Corporation was incorporated in 2005 as a Delaware corporation and is the successor to operations originally begun in June 1977.

Applications and Infrastructure Technologies

Oracle's comprehensive portfolio of applications and infrastructure technologies is designed to address an organization's IT environment needs including business process, infrastructure and applications development requirements, among others. Oracle technologies are based upon industry standards and are designed to be enterprise-grade, reliable, scalable and secure. Oracle applications and infrastructure technologies including database and middleware software as well as enterprise applications, virtualization, clustering, large-scale systems management and related infrastructure products and services are the building blocks of Oracle Cloud Services, our partners' cloud services, and our customers' cloud IT environments. Oracle applications and infrastructure offerings are marketed and sold through our cloud and license, hardware, and services businesses and are delivered through the Oracle Cloud, or through other IT deployment models including cloud-based, hybrid and on-premise. We believe Oracle applications and infrastructure offerings enable flexibility, interoperability and choice to best meet customer IT needs.

We believe that our Oracle Cloud Services offerings are opportunities for us to expand our cloud and license business. We believe that our customers increasingly recognize the value of access to cloud-based applications and infrastructure capabilities via a lower cost, rapidly deployable, flexible and interoperable services model that Oracle manages and maintains on the customer's behalf. We believe that we can market and sell our SaaS and IaaS offerings together to help customers migrate their extensive installed base of on-premise applications and infrastructure technologies to the Oracle Cloud while at the same time reaching a broader ecosystem of developers and partners. We also believe we can market our SaaS and IaaS services to small and medium-sized businesses and non-IT lines of business purchasers due to the highly available, intuitive design, low touch and low cost characteristics of the Oracle Cloud.

Index to Financial Statements

In recent periods, customer demand for our applications and infrastructure technologies delivered through our Oracle Cloud Services deployment models has increased. To address customer demand and enable customer choice, we have introduced certain programs for customers to pivot their applications and infrastructure licenses and license support contracts to the Oracle Cloud for new deployments and to migrate to and expand with the Oracle Cloud for their existing workloads. We expect these trends to continue.

Oracle License Support

Oracle license support offerings are marketed and sold as a part of our cloud and license business. Substantially all of our customers opt to purchase license support contracts when they purchase Oracle applications and infrastructure licenses to run within the Oracle Cloud or other cloud-based and on-premise IT environments. We believe our license support offerings protect and enhance our customers' investments in Oracle applications and infrastructure technologies because they provide proactive and personalized support services including Oracle Lifetime Support and unspecified license enhancements and upgrades during the term of the support period. Substantially all license support customers renew their support contracts with us upon expiration in order to continue to benefit from technical support services and the periodic issuance of unspecified updates and enhancements, which current license support customers are entitled to receive. Our license support contracts are generally priced as a percentage of the net fees paid by the customer to access the license and are typically one year in duration.

Applications Technologies

Oracle applications technologies are marketed, sold and delivered through our cloud and license business and represented 35%, 34% and 33% of our cloud and license business revenues during fiscal 2019, 2018 and 2017, respectively. Oracle applications technologies consist of comprehensive cloud-based offerings including our Oracle Cloud SaaS offerings, which are available for customers as a subscription, and Oracle Applications license offerings, which are available for customers to purchase for use in Oracle Cloud IaaS, other cloud-based, and on-premise IT environments with the option to purchase related license support. Regardless of the deployment model selected, our applications technologies are designed to reduce the risk, cost and complexity of our customers' IT infrastructures, while supporting customer choice with flexible deployment models that readily enable performance, agility, compatibility and extendibility. Our applications technologies are generally designed using industry standard architectures to manage and automate core business functions across the enterprise, as well as to help customers differentiate and innovate in those processes unique to their industries or organizations. We offer applications that are deployable to meet a number of business automation requirements across a broad range of industries. We also offer industry-specific applications through a focused strategy of investments in internal development and strategic acquisitions, which provide solutions to customers in communications, construction and engineering, financial services, health sciences, hospitality, manufacturing, public sector, retail and utilities, among other industries.

Oracle Cloud Software as a Service (SaaS)

Oracle's broad spectrum of Oracle Cloud SaaS offerings provides customers a choice of software applications that are delivered via a cloud-based IT environment that we host, manage, upgrade and support, and that customers access by entering into a subscription agreement with us for a stated period. Our SaaS offerings are built upon open industry standards such as SQL, Java and HTML5 for easier application accessibility, integration and development. Our SaaS offerings include a broad suite of modular, next-generation cloud software applications that span core business functions including enterprise resource planning (ERP), human capital management (HCM), customer experience (CX), and supply chain management (SCM), among others. We also offer a number of cloud-based industry solutions to address specific customer needs within certain industries.

We believe that the comprehensiveness and breadth of our SaaS offerings differentiate us from many of our competitors that offer more limited or specialized applications. Our SaaS offerings are designed to support connected business processes in the cloud and are centered on a responsive and flexible business core and a common data model. We believe our cloud ERP offerings drive adoption of our other SaaS offerings as our customers realize benefits of a common data model utilized across our SaaS offerings. Our SaaS offerings are designed to deliver a secure data isolation architecture and flexible upgrades; self-service access controls for users; a Service-Oriented Architecture (SOA); built-in social, mobile and business insight capabilities; and a high performance, high availability infrastructure based on our infrastructure technologies, including Oracle Engineered Systems. These SaaS capabilities are designed to simplify IT environments, reduce time to implementation and risk, provide an intuitive user experience for casual and experienced users, and enable customers to focus resources on business growth opportunities. Our SaaS offerings are also designed to incorporate emerging technologies such as Internet-of-Things (IoT), Artificial Intelligence (AI), Machine Learning (ML), blockchain, and advances in the "human interface" and how users interact with Oracle Cloud SaaS offerings.

Our Oracle Cloud SaaS offerings include, among others:

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Oracle ERP Cloud, which is designed to be a complete, global and integrated ERP solution to help organizations improve decision making and workforce productivity, and to optimize back-office operations by utilizing a single data and security model with a common user interface. We also offer NetSuite ERP, which is a cloud-based ERP product that is generally marketed to small to medium-sized organizations and is designed to run back-office operations and financial processes and includes financial management, revenue management and billing, inventory, supply chain and warehouse management capabilities, among others;

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Oracle HCM Cloud, which is designed to help organizations find, develop and retain their talent, enable collaboration, provide complete workforce insights, improve business process efficiency, and enable users to connect to an integrated suite of HCM applications from any device;

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Oracle CX Cloud, which is designed to be a complete and integrated solution to help organizations deliver consistent and personalized customer experiences across their customer channels, touch points and interactions;

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Oracle SCM Cloud, which is designed to help organizations create, optimize and digitize their supply chains and innovate products quickly; and

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Oracle Data Cloud, which is designed to enable organizations to leverage their own data and consumer data to inform and measure marketing strategies and programs.

Oracle Applications

Customers have the ability to license Oracle Applications for use within the Oracle Cloud or within their own cloud-based or on-premise IT environments. Oracle Applications are designed to manage and automate core business functions across the enterprise, including HCM; ERP; financial management and governance, risk and compliance; procurement; project portfolio management; SCM; business analytics and enterprise performance management; CX and customer relationship management; and industry-specific applications, among others.

As described above, we provide customers with an option to purchase license support contracts in connection with the purchase of Oracle Applications licenses.

Infrastructure Technologies

Oracle infrastructure technologies are marketed, sold and delivered through our cloud and license business and through our hardware business.

Our cloud and license business' infrastructure technologies include the Oracle Database, which is the world's most popular enterprise database; Java, which is the computer industry's most widely-used software development language; middleware; and development tools, among others. These technologies are available through subscription to our Oracle Cloud IaaS offerings or with the purchase of a license to run within the Oracle Cloud or other cloud-based and on-premise IT environments and related license support at the customer's option. Our infrastructure technologies are designed to provide cost-effective, standards-based, high-performance platforms and infrastructure to develop, run, integrate, manage and extend business applications. Our cloud and license infrastructure technologies also provide cloud-based compute, storage and networking capabilities through our Oracle Cloud IaaS offerings. Our customers are increasingly focused on developing innovations and reducing the total cost of their IT infrastructure, and we believe that Oracle infrastructure technologies help them achieve this goal.

In addition to utilizing our cloud and license business' infrastructure technologies to modernize approaches to their IT environments, customer interest is increasing for emerging technologies such as IoT, chatbots and AI/ML to automate business processes, reduce human error and provide a platform to build new and innovative applications. We deliver emerging technologies through certain of our applications and infrastructure technologies, including as a part of Oracle Autonomous Data Warehouse Cloud Service, which is described further below.

Our hardware business' infrastructure technologies include hardware products and certain unique hardware-related software offerings, such as Oracle Engineered Systems, servers, storage, industry-specific hardware, virtualization software, operating systems, management software, and related hardware services including support at the customer's option.

We design our infrastructure technologies to work in customer environments that may include other Oracle or non-Oracle hardware or software components. Our flexible and open approach provides Oracle customers a choice as to how they can utilize and deploy Oracle infrastructure technologies: through the use of Oracle Cloud offerings; in our customers' data centers; or a hybrid combination of these two deployment models, such as in the Oracle Cloud at Customer deployment model. We focus on the operation and integration of Oracle infrastructure technologies to make them easier to deploy, extend, interconnect, manage and maintain for our customers and to improve computing performance relative to our competitors' offerings. For example, we design Oracle Engineered Systems to integrate multiple Oracle technology components to work together to deliver improved performance, availability, security and operational efficiency relative to our competitors' products.

Oracle Infrastructure Technologies - Cloud and License Business Offerings

Oracle infrastructure technologies are marketed, sold and delivered through our cloud and license business and represented 65%, 66% and 67% of our cloud and license business' total revenues in fiscal 2019, 2018 and 2017, respectively.

Oracle Cloud Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS)

Oracle Cloud IaaS is based upon Oracle's Generation 2 Cloud technology and is designed to deliver platform, compute, storage and networking services, among others, that Oracle runs, manages, upgrades and supports on behalf of the customer for a fee for a stated time period, or for certain of our IaaS services, on a "pay-as-you-go" basis for services at a specified rate. By utilizing Oracle Cloud IaaS, customers leverage the Oracle Cloud for enterprise-grade, scalable, cost-effective and secure infrastructure technologies that are designed to be rapidly deployable while reducing the amount of time and resources normally consumed by IT processes within on-premise environments. Oracle Generation 2 Cloud infrastructure technology is designed to be differentiated from other cloud vendors to provide better security by separating control code from customer data on separate

computers with a different architecture. We continue to invest in Oracle Cloud IaaS to expand the catalog of tools and services we provide to simplify the process of migrating workloads to the Oracle Cloud, as well as to provide customers with the ability to run workloads across on-premise IT environments and the Oracle Cloud in a hybrid deployment model. Customers use Oracle Cloud IaaS offerings to build and operate new cloud-native applications, to run new workloads and to move their existing Oracle or non-Oracle workloads to the Oracle Cloud from their data centers or from other cloud-based IT environments, among other uses.

Oracle customers and partners utilize Oracle's open, standards-based IaaS offerings for platform related services that are based upon the Oracle Database, Oracle Middleware including Java, open source, and other tools for a variety of use cases across data management, applications development, integration, content and experience, business analytics, IT operations management and security.

Oracle customers and partners also utilize Oracle Cloud IaaS for enterprise-grade compute, storage and networking services. Our Oracle Cloud IaaS offerings' compute services range from virtual machines to GPU-based offerings to bare metal servers and include options for dense I/O workloads and high performance computing. Oracle Cloud IaaS also includes a range of storage offerings including block, object and archive storage services, as well as containers, networking and edge services to help mitigate denial of service attacks on customer networks.

Oracle Cloud at Customer offerings are a direct response to restrictions imposed upon cloud-based IT environment adoption by businesses that operate within certain regulated industries or jurisdictions. Oracle Cloud at Customer enables customers to access certain IaaS capabilities of the Oracle Cloud in their own data centers behind their firewalls while having the services managed by Oracle. Oracle Cloud at Customer offerings allow customers to take advantage of the agility, innovation and subscription-based pricing of Oracle Cloud Services while meeting data sovereignty, data residency, data protection and regulatory business policy requirements.

Oracle also offers Oracle Managed Cloud Services, which are designed to provide comprehensive software and hardware management, maintenance and security services for customer cloud-based, hybrid or other infrastructure for a fee for a stated term. Oracle Managed Cloud Services may be hosted at our Oracle data center facilities, select partner data centers or physically at our customers' facilities.

Oracle Database

The Oracle Database is the world's most popular enterprise database and is designed to enable reliable and secure storage, retrieval and manipulation of all forms of data. The Oracle Database is licensed throughout the world by businesses and organizations of different sizes for a multitude of purposes, including, among others: for use within the Oracle Cloud to deliver our Cloud SaaS and Cloud IaaS offerings; for use by a number of cloud-based vendors in offering their cloud services; for packaged and custom applications for transactions processing; and for data warehousing and business intelligence. The Oracle Database may be deployed within different IT environments including Oracle Cloud and Oracle Cloud at Customer environments, other cloud-based IT environments, and on-premise data centers, among others. Customers may elect to purchase license support for Oracle Database licenses that are purchased at their option.

Oracle Database Enterprise Edition is available with a number of optional add-on products to address specific customer requirements. In addition to the Oracle Database, we also offer a portfolio of specialized database products to address particular customer requirements including MySQL, Oracle TimesTen In-Memory Database, Oracle Berkeley DB and Oracle NoSQL Database.

Oracle Autonomous Database

Oracle Autonomous Database is an Oracle Cloud IaaS offering that utilizes Oracle's Generation 2 Cloud infrastructure and is designed to deliver performance and scale with automated database operations and policy-driven optimization implemented with machine learning to lower labor costs and reduce human error for routine database administration tasks including maintenance, tuning, patching, security and backup, among others. Oracle Autonomous Database uses self-driving diagnostics for fault prediction and error handling. We believe Oracle Autonomous Database can deliver rapid insights and innovation by enabling organizations to quickly provision a data warehouse that automatically and elastically scales to millions of transactions per second while enabling organizations to pay only for the capacity used. Oracle Autonomous Database offerings include:

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Oracle Autonomous Data Warehouse Cloud Service (ADW), which is designed to be a fully managed, high-performance and elastic service optimized for data warehouse workloads. ADW's self-patching and self-tuning capabilities are designed to enable upgrades while the database is running, eliminating human error. Oracle ADW automates manual IT tasks such as storing, securing, scaling and backing-up. In addition, the machine learning based technology of ADW is designed to enable customers to deploy new or move existing data marts and data warehouses to the cloud; and

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Oracle Autonomous Transaction Processing Cloud Service (ATP), which is designed to enable businesses to safely run a complex mix of high-performance transactions, reporting and batch processing using instant, elastic compute and storage through an Oracle Database running on an Oracle Exadata cloud-based instance. Oracle ATP is designed to enable organizations to conduct real-time transactional data analysis for faster results and lower administration costs, and to eliminate cyber-attacks on unpatched or unencrypted databases. Oracle ATP is designed to be simple and agile to develop and deploy new applications because no complex management or tuning is required. The integration of Oracle ATP with other Oracle Cloud services, such as Java Cloud and Oracle APEX, and the open interfaces and integrations of Oracle ATP provide developers with a modern, open platform to develop new innovative applications.

Oracle Big Data and Analytics

Big data generally refers to a massive amount of unstructured, streaming and structured data that is so large that it is difficult to process using traditional IT techniques. Oracle offers big data and analytics solutions to complement and extend Oracle applications and infrastructure technologies. We believe that most businesses view big data as a potentially high-value source of analytics that can be used to gain new insights into their customers' behaviors, to anticipate future demand more accurately, to align workforce deployment with business activity forecasts and to accelerate the pace of operations, among other benefits. We offer a broad portfolio of offerings to address an organization's big data requirements including, among others, cloud-based services for data integration, data management, analytics and integrated machine learning.

Oracle Middleware

We license our Oracle Middleware, which is a broad family of integrated application infrastructure software, for use in the Oracle Cloud, other cloud-based environments, on-premise data centers and related IT environments. Oracle Middleware is designed to form a reliable and scalable foundation on which customers can build, deploy, secure, access, extend and integrate business applications and automate their business processes. Built with Oracle's Java technology platform, Oracle Middleware products are designed to be flexible across different deployment environments-cloud, on-premise or hybrid-as a foundation for custom, packaged and composite applications, thereby simplifying and reducing time to deployment. Oracle Middleware is designed to protect customers' IT investments and work with both Oracle and non-Oracle database, middleware and applications software through an open architecture and adherence to industry standards. Specifically, Oracle Middleware is designed to enable customers to integrate Oracle and non-Oracle business applications, automate business processes, scale applications to meet customer demand, simplify security and compliance, manage lifecycles of documents and get actionable, targeted business intelligence. In addition, Oracle Middleware supports multiple development languages and tools, which enables developers to flexibly build and deploy web services, websites, portals and web-based applications globally across different IT environments.

Among our other middleware license offerings, we license a wide range of development tools, such as identity management and business analytics software for mobile computing development that are designed to address the needs of businesses that are increasingly focused on delivering mobile device applications to their customers. We also offer certain of these mobile development capabilities as a cloud service, including Oracle Mobile Cloud Service, among others.

Customers may elect to purchase license support, as described above, for Oracle Middleware licenses at their option.

Java

Java is the computer industry's most widely-used software development language and is viewed as a global standard. We believe the Java programming language and platform together represent one of the most popular and powerful development environments in the world, one that is used by millions of developers globally to develop embedded applications, web content, enterprise software and games. Oracle Middleware software products and certain of our Oracle Applications are built using the Oracle Java technology platform, which we believe is a key advantage for our business. Customers may license the use of Java or access Java through Oracle Java Cloud Service.

Java is designed to enable developers to write software on a single platform and run it on many other different platforms, independent of operating system and hardware architecture. Java has been adopted by both independent software vendors (ISVs) that have built their products on Java and by enterprise organizations building custom applications or consuming Java-based ISV products.

Oracle Infrastructure Technologies - Hardware Business Offerings

Oracle infrastructure technologies are also marketed, sold and delivered through our hardware business, including a broad selection of hardware products and related hardware support services for cloud-based IT environments, data centers and related IT environments.

Oracle Engineered Systems

Oracle Engineered Systems are core to our cloud-based and on-premise data center infrastructure offerings. Oracle Engineered Systems are pre-integrated products, combining multiple unique Oracle technology components, including database, storage, operating system or middleware software with server, storage and networking hardware and other technologies. Oracle Engineered Systems are designed to work together to deliver improved performance, scalability, availability, security and operational efficiency relative to our competitors' products; to be upgraded effectively and efficiently; and to simplify maintenance cycles by providing a single solution for software patching. For example, Oracle Exadata Database Machine is a computing platform that is designed to be optimized for running Oracle Database to achieve higher performance and availability at a lower cost by combining Oracle Database, storage and operating system software with Oracle server, storage and networking hardware. We offer certain of our Oracle Engineered Systems, including Oracle Exadata Database Machine, among others, through flexible deployment options, including on-premise, and as an infrastructure cloud service and cloud at customer service.

Servers

We offer a wide range of server products that are designed for mission-critical enterprise environments and that are key components of our engineered systems offerings and cloud offerings. We have two families of server products: those based on the Oracle SPARC microprocessor, which are designed to be differentiated by their reliability, security and scalability for UNIX environments; and those using microprocessors from Intel Corporation. By offering a range of server sizes and microprocessors, customers are offered the flexibility to choose the types of servers that they believe will be most appropriate and valuable for their particular IT environments. We believe the combination of Oracle server systems with Oracle software enhances our customers' ability to shift data and workloads between data center and cloud deployments based on business requirements.

Storage

Oracle storage products are engineered for the cloud and designed to securely store, manage, protect and archive customers' mission-critical data assets generated by any database or application. Oracle storage products combine flash, disk, tape and server technologies with optimized software and unique integrations with Oracle Database designed to offer greater performance and efficiency, and lower total cost relative to our competitors' storage products. Certain of our storage products are also offered as cloud-based services through the Oracle Cloud. Our storage offerings include, among others, Oracle ZFS Storage Appliance, a unified storage system that combines network attached storage, storage area network and object storage capabilities; Oracle's Zero Data Loss Recovery Appliance that provides unique, recovery-focused data protection for Oracle Database; and Oracle's StorageTek tape storage and automation product line which includes tape drives, tape libraries, media and software packages that provide lifecycle data management and security for enterprise backup and archive requirements.

Industry-Specific Hardware Offerings

We offer hardware products and services designed for certain specific industries including our point-of-sale terminals and related hardware that are designed for managing businesses within the food and beverage, hotel and retail industries; and hardware products and services for communications networks including network signaling, policy control and subscriber data management solutions, and session border control technology, among others.

Operating Systems, Virtualization, Management and Other Hardware-Related Software

We offer a portfolio of operating systems, including Oracle Linux and Oracle Solaris, virtualization software including Oracle VM, and other hardware-related software including development, management and file systems tools that are designed to optimize the performance, efficiency, and security of customers' hardware products while providing customers with high levels of flexibility, reliability and availability. We also offer a range of management technologies and products, including Oracle Enterprise Manager, designed to help customers efficiently operate complex IT environments, including both end users' and service providers' cloud environments.

Hardware Support

Our hardware support offerings provide customers with unspecified software updates for software components that are essential to the functionality of our hardware products and associated software products such as Oracle Solaris. These offerings can also include product repairs, maintenance services and technical support services. We continue to evolve hardware support processes that are intended to proactively identify and solve quality issues and to increase the amount of new and renewed hardware support contracts sold in connection with the sales of our hardware products. Hardware support contracts are generally priced as a percentage of the net hardware products fees.

Services

We offer services solutions to help customers and partners maximize the performance of their investments in Oracle applications and infrastructure technologies. We believe that our services are differentiated based on our focus on Oracle technologies, extensive experience and broad sets of intellectual property and best practices. Our services offerings include, among others:

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consulting services, which are designed to help our customers and global system integrator partners more successfully architect and deploy our cloud and license offerings, including IT strategy alignment, enterprise architecture planning and design, initial software implementation and integration, application development and integration services, security assessments and ongoing software enhancements and upgrades. We utilize a global, blended delivery model to optimize value for our customers and partners, consisting of consultants from local geographies, industry specialists and consultants from our global delivery and solution centers;

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advanced customer support services, which are provided at customer facilities and remotely to enable increased performance and higher availability of their Oracle products and services; and

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education services for Oracle's cloud and license offerings, including training and certification programs that are offered to customers, partners and employees through a variety of formats including instructor-led classes, live virtual training, video-based training on demand, online learning subscriptions, private events and custom training.

Oracle Cloud Operations

Oracle Cloud Operations deliver our Oracle Cloud Services to customers through a secure, reliable, scalable, enterprise grade cloud infrastructure platform managed by our employees within a global network of data centers, which we refer to as the Oracle Cloud. Oracle Cloud Operations leverage automated software tools to enable the rapid delivery of the latest cloud technology capabilities to the Oracle Cloud as they become available. The Oracle Cloud enables secure and isolated cloud-based instances for each of our customers to access the functionality of our Oracle Cloud Services via a broad spectrum of devices.

Manufacturing

To produce our hardware products that we market and sell to third-party customers and that we utilize internally to deliver as a part of our Oracle Cloud operations, we rely on both our internal manufacturing operations as well as third-party manufacturing partners. Our internal manufacturing operations consist primarily of materials procurement, assembly, testing and quality control of our Oracle Engineered Systems and certain of our enterprise and data center servers and storage products. For all other manufacturing, we generally rely on third-party manufacturing partners to produce our hardware-related components and hardware products and we may involve our internal manufacturing operations in the final assembly, testing and quality control processes for these components and products. We distribute most of our hardware products from either our facilities or partner facilities. Our manufacturing processes are substantially based on standardization of components across product types, centralization of assembly and distribution centers and a "build-to-order" methodology in which products generally are built only after customers have placed firm orders. Production of our hardware products requires that we purchase materials, supplies, product subassemblies and full assemblies from a number of vendors. For most of our hardware products, we have existing alternate sources of supply or such sources are readily available. However, we do rely on sole sources for certain of our hardware products. As a result, we continue to evaluate potential risks of disruption to our supply chain operations. Refer to "Risk Factors" included in Item 1A within this Annual Report for additional discussion of the challenges we encounter with respect to the sources and availability of supplies for our products and the related risks to our business.

Sales and Marketing

We directly market and sell our cloud, license, hardware and services offerings to businesses of many sizes and in many industries, government agencies and educational institutions. We also market and sell our offerings through indirect channels. No single customer accounted for 10% or more of our total revenues in fiscal 2019, 2018 and 2017.

In the United States (U.S.), our sales and services employees are based in our headquarters and in field offices throughout the country. Outside the U.S., our international subsidiaries sell, support and service our offerings in their local countries as well as within other foreign countries where we do not operate through a direct sales subsidiary. Our geographic coverage allows us to draw on business and technical expertise from a global workforce, provides stability to our operations and revenue streams to offset geography specific economic trends and offers us an opportunity to take advantage of new markets for our offerings. Our international operations subject us to certain risks, which are more fully described in "Risk Factors" included in Item 1A of this Annual Report. A summary of our domestic and international revenues and long-lived assets is set forth in Note 15 of Notes to Consolidated Financial Statements included elsewhere in this Annual Report.

We also market our product offerings worldwide through indirect channels. The companies that comprise our indirect channel network are members of the Oracle Partner Network. The Oracle Partner Network is a global program that manages our business relationships with a large, broad-based network of companies, including independent software and hardware vendors, system integrators and resellers that deliver innovative solutions and services based upon our product offerings. By offering our partners access to our product offerings, educational information, technical services, marketing and sales support, the Oracle Partner Network program extends our market reach by providing our partners with the resources they need to be successful in delivering solutions to customers globally. The majority of our hardware products are sold through indirect channels including independent distributors and value-added resellers.

Research and Development

We develop the substantial majority of our product offerings internally. In addition, we have extended our product offerings and intellectual property through acquisitions of businesses and technologies. We also purchase or license intellectual property rights in certain circumstances. Internal development allows us to maintain technical control over the design and development of our products. We have a number of U.S. and foreign patents and pending applications that relate to various aspects of our products and technology. While we believe that our patents have value, no single patent is essential to us or to any of our principal businesses. Rapid technological advances in hardware and software development, evolving standards in computer hardware and software technology, changing customer needs and frequent new product introductions, offerings and enhancements characterize the markets in which we compete. We plan to continue to dedicate a significant amount of resources to research and development efforts to maintain and improve our current product and service offerings.

Employees

As of May 31, 2019, we employed approximately 136,000 full-time employees, including approximately 39,000 in sales and marketing, approximately 18,000 in our cloud services and license support operations, approximately 4,000 in hardware, approximately 24,000 in services, approximately 38,000 in research and development and approximately 13,000 in general and administrative positions. Of these employees, approximately 48,000 were employed in the U.S. and approximately 88,000 were employed internationally. None of our employees in the U.S. is represented by a labor union; however, in certain foreign subsidiaries, labor unions or workers' councils represent some of our employees.

Seasonality and Cyclicality

Our quarterly revenues have historically been affected by a variety of seasonal factors, including the structure of our sales force incentive compensation plans, which are common in the technology industry. In each fiscal year, our total revenues and operating margins are typically highest in our fourth fiscal quarter and lowest in our first fiscal quarter. The operating margins of our businesses (in particular, our cloud and license business and hardware business) are generally affected by seasonal factors in a similar manner as our revenues because certain expenses within our cost structure are relatively fixed in the short term. See "Cloud and License Business" and "Selected Quarterly Financial Data" in Item 7 of this Annual Report for more information regarding the seasonality and cyclicality of our revenues, expenses and margins.

Competition

We face intense competition in all aspects of our business. The nature of the IT industry creates a competitive landscape that is constantly evolving as firms emerge, expand or are acquired, as technology evolves and as customer demands and competitive pressures otherwise change.

Our customers are demanding less complexity and lower total cost in the implementation, sourcing, integration and ongoing maintenance of their enterprise software and hardware. Our enterprise cloud license and on-premise license, and hardware offerings compete directly with certain offerings from some of the largest and most competitive companies in the world, including Amazon.com, Inc., Microsoft Corporation, International Business Machines Corporation (IBM), Intel Corporation, Cisco Systems, Inc., Adobe Systems Incorporated, Alphabet Inc. and SAP SE, as well as other companies like Hewlett-Packard Enterprise, salesforce.com, inc. and Workday, Inc. In addition, due to the low barriers to entry in many of our market segments, new technologies and new and growing competitors frequently emerge to challenge our offerings. Our competitors range from companies offering broad IT solutions across many of our lines of business to vendors providing point solutions, or offerings focused on a specific functionality, product area or industry. In addition, as we expand into new market segments, we face increased competition as we compete with existing competitors, as well as firms that may be partners in other areas of our business and other firms with whom we have not previously competed. Moreover, we or our competitors may take certain strategic actions-including acquisitions, partnerships and joint ventures, or repositioning of product lines-which invite even greater competition in one or more product offering categories.

Key competitive factors in each of the segments in which we currently compete and may compete in the future include: total cost of ownership, performance, scalability, reliability, security, functionality, efficiency, speed to production and quality of technical support. Our product and service sales (and the relative strength of our products and services versus those of our competitors) are also directly and indirectly affected by the following, among other things:

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the adoption of cloud-based IT offerings including SaaS and IaaS offerings;

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ease of deployment, use and maintenance of our products and services offerings;

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compatibility between Oracle products and services deployed within local IT environments and public cloud IT environments, including our Oracle Cloud environments;

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the adoption of commodity servers and microprocessors;

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the broader "platform" competition between our industry standard Java technology platform and the .NET programming environment of Microsoft;

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operating system competition among our Oracle Solaris and Linux operating systems, with alternatives including Microsoft's Windows Server, and other UNIX and Linux operating systems;

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the adoption of open source alternatives to commercial software by enterprise software customers;

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products, features and functionality developed internally by customers and their IT staff;

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products, features and functionality customized and implemented for customers by consultants, systems integrators or other third parties; and

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attractiveness of offerings from business processing outsourcers.

For more information about the competitive risks we face, refer to Item 1A. "Risk Factors" included elsewhere in this Annual Report.

Available Information

Our Annual Report on Form 10-K, Quarterly Reports on Form 10-Q, Current Reports on Form 8-K and amendments to those reports filed pursuant to Sections 13(a) and 15(d) of the Securities Exchange Act of 1934, as amended, are available, free of charge, on the SEC's website at www.sec.gov and our Investor Relations website at www.oracle.com/investor as soon as reasonably practicable after we electronically file such materials with, or furnish it to, the SEC. We use our Investor Relations website as a means of disclosing material non-public information. Accordingly, investors should monitor our Investor Relations website, in addition to following our press releases, SEC filings and public conference calls and webcasts. In addition, information regarding our environmental policy and global sustainability initiatives and solutions are also available on our website www.oracle.com/corporate/citizenship. The information posted on or accessible through our website is not incorporated into this Annual Report.

Information about our Executive Officers

Our executive officers are listed below.

Name

Office(s)

Lawrence J. Ellison

Chairman of the Board of Directors and Chief Technology Officer

Safra A. Catz

Chief Executive Officer and Director

Mark V. Hurd

Chief Executive Officer and Director

Jeffrey O. Henley

Vice Chairman of the Board of Directors

Edward Screven

Executive Vice President, Chief Corporate Architect

Dorian E. Daley

Executive Vice President and General Counsel

William Corey West

Executive Vice President, Corporate Controller and Chief Accounting Officer

Mr. Ellison, 74, has been our Chairman of the Board and Chief Technology Officer since September 2014. He served as our Chief Executive Officer from June 1977, when he founded Oracle, until September 2014. He has served as a Director since June 1977. He previously served as our Chairman of the Board from May 1995 to January 2004. He currently serves as a director of Tesla, Inc.

Ms. Catz, 57, has been our Chief Executive Officer since September 2014. She served as our President from January 2004 to September 2014, our Chief Financial Officer most recently from April 2011 until September 2014 and a Director since October 2001. She was previously our Chief Financial Officer from November 2005 until September 2008 and our Interim Chief Financial Officer from April 2005 until July 2005. Prior to being named our President, she held various other positions with us since joining Oracle in 1999. She currently serves as a director of The Walt Disney Company and she previously served as a director of HSBC Holdings plc.

Mr. Hurd, 62, has been our Chief Executive Officer since September 2014. He served as our President from September 2010 to September 2014 and a Director since September 2010. Prior to joining us, he served as Chairman of the Board of Directors of Hewlett-Packard Company from September 2006 to August 2010 and as Chief Executive Officer, President and a member of the Board of Directors of Hewlett-Packard Company from April 2005 to August 2010.

Mr. Henley, 74, has served as our Vice Chairman of the Board since September 2014. He previously served as our Chairman of the Board from January 2004 to September 2014 and has served as a Director since June 1995. He served as our Executive Vice President and Chief Financial Officer from March 1991 to July 2004.

Mr. Screven, 54, has been Executive Vice President, Chief Corporate Architect since May 2015. He served as our Senior Vice President, Chief Corporate Architect from November 2006 to April 2015 and as Vice President, Chief Corporate Architect from January 2003 to November 2006. He held various other positions with us since joining Oracle in 1986.

Ms. Daley, 60, has been our Executive Vice President and General Counsel since April 2015. She served as our Secretary from October 2007 until October 2017 and she was our Senior Vice President, General Counsel from October 2007 to April 2015. She served as our Vice President, Legal, Associate General Counsel and Assistant Secretary from June 2004 to October 2007, as Associate General Counsel and Assistant Secretary from October 2001 to June 2004 and as Associate General Counsel from February 2001 to October 2001. She held various other positions with us since joining Oracle's Legal Department in 1992.

Mr. West, 57, has been our Executive Vice President, Corporate Controller and Chief Accounting Officer since April 2015. He served as our Senior Vice President, Corporate Controller and Chief Accounting Officer from February 2008 to April 2015 and served as our Vice President, Corporate Controller and Chief Accounting Officer from April 2007 to February 2008. His previous experience includes 14 years with Arthur Andersen LLP, most recently as a partner.