Good day, everyone, welcome to today's Oracle Corporation third quarter fiscal year 2014 conference. Today's call is being recorded. At this time, I'd like to introduce Ken Bond, Vice President of Investor Relations, Oracle. Please go ahead, sir.
Thank you, Kelly, and good afternoon, everyone, and welcome to Oracle's third quarter fiscal year 2014 earnings conference call. A copy of the press release and financial tables, which includes a GAAP to non-GAAP reconciliation and other supplemental financial information, can be viewed and downloaded from our investor relations website. On the call today are Chief Executive Officer, Larry Ellison, President and CFO, Safra Catz, and President Mark Hurd. As a reminder, today's discussion will include forward-looking statements, including predictions, expectations, estimates, or other information that might be considered forward-looking. Throughout today's discussion, we will present some important factors relating to our business, which may potentially affect these forward-looking statements. These forward-looking statements are also subject to risks and uncertainties that may cause actual results to differ materially from statements made today.
As a result, we caution you against placing undue reliance on these forward-looking statements, and we encourage you to review our most recent reports, including our 10-Q and 10-K, and any applicable amendments for a complete discussion of these factors and other risks that may affect our future results or the market price of our stock. Finally, we are not obligating ourselves to revise our results or publicly release any revisions to these forward-looking statements in light of new information or future events. Before taking questions, we'll begin with a few prepared remarks, and with that, I'll turn the call over to Safra.
Thanks, Ken. I'm going to focus on our non-GAAP results for Q3. I'll then review guidance for Q4 and turn the call over to Larry and Mark for their comments. This quarter, currency was a 1% headwind to new software license and a 2% headwind to hardware and total revenue. In addition, EPS this year was reduced by $0.02 due to a currency remeasurement non-operating loss for Venezuela that obviously had not been included in my guidance. In Q3 of last year, Venezuela's devaluation had a $0.01 impact. Q3 for us was a solid quarter, and overall, we're pleased with our results. Core businesses were within guidance and areas of investor focus, including cloud, engineered systems, and hardware, all delivered strong results. My comments today are generally going to reflect constant dollar growth rates unless I mention it otherwise.
Total software revenues were nearly $7 billion, up 6% from last year. Software updates and product support revenues drove nearly half the total company revenue at $4.6 billion, up 7% from last year. Q3 renewal rates were at a four-year high as our installed base of 400,000 customers continues to power earnings and cash flow. New software license revenues were $2.4 billion, up 5%. Looking at GAAP results by region, the Americas grew 9%, with Latin America particularly strong, and EMEA grew 3%. Asia-Pacific, though, declined, with Australia and India both down. Within software, cloud subscriptions were $292 million, up 24% from last year. As our cloud business continues to ramp, bookings growth was again much higher than cloud subscription revenue growth.
We've been using Fusion accounting for our own financial reporting for two years. Revenues for all portfolios of Fusion, including financials, supply chain, HCM, and customer experience, grew triple digits. As our cloud business becomes more material, I want to share how cloud subscriptions affect our financials. Most obvious is that revenue is initially lower as subscription license revenue is recognized over the life of the agreement as opposed to license revenue being taken up front. Over time, since we are providing much more than just the software and the updates, the revenue is higher. The additional value we are providing is the hardware, including our engineered systems, the hosting, and the expertise that only Oracle can provide while leveraging the economies of scale that we have. While customers are paying over time, they're using and paying for more Oracle products through cloud subscription.
They are paying less in total because they too can benefit from our operating synergies. Net net, the cloud operating business is attractive for both customers and for Oracle, but especially so given the integration of Oracle hardware, software, and expertise. For software, database continues to do very well with Exadata, Exalytics, and business intelligence software products all up more than 30%. Also strong with customer experience and/or CRM, both on-premise and SaaS, as well as our communications and project management verticals. The quarter was not dependent on any one large deal. Hardware system product revenue was $725 million, up 10% from last year. Obviously, we're pleased to have exceeded our guidance, but it's also nice to report growth.
Engineered Systems grew more than 30%. This spectacular growth is reflected not only in our hardware growth, but also in the very long list of customer wins we had against IBM. Engineered Systems now account for nearly a third of all hardware product sales. Hardware growth margins are down about two points because we are packing the newest systems with more memory without raising prices. Hardware support was $600 million, up 7% from last year, but down sequentially on our normal seasonal pattern. For the company, total revenue for the quarter was $9.3 billion, up 6% from last year. Non-GAAP operating income grew $188 million to $4.4 billion, up 6% over last year. The operating margin was 47%. We believe we can invest for growth and make money as we continue to see leverage in our business model.
As I mentioned earlier, included in our non-operating expense is a foreign currency remeasurement loss of $110 million related to our Venezuelan subsidiary. Were it not for this loss, EPS would have been $0.02 higher. The non-GAAP tax rate for the quarter was 23%. The non-GAAP EPS was $0.68 in US dollars, growing 7% in constant currency. The GAAP tax rate was 21%, and GAAP EPS for the quarter was $0.56 in US dollars, up 10% in constant currency. Free cash flow increased 11% to $14.4 billion over the last four quarters. We now have more than $37 billion in cash and marketable securities. Net of debt, our cash position is approximately $13 billion. As we've said before, we are committed to returning value to our shareholders through earnings growth, stock repurchases, and a dividend.
This quarter, we repurchased 55.4 million shares for a total of $2 billion. Over the last 12 months, we've repurchased nearly 360 million shares for a total of $10.7 billion and reduced our share count by 5%. We've also paid out more than $1.6 billion in dividends this fiscal year so far. Stock repurchases and dividends have totaled more than 85% of free cash flow over the last 12 months, and the board of directors declared a quarterly dividend of $0.12 per share. Now to the guidance. If currency were to stay where it is today, then the impact of currency would be minimal. Of course, this could change quickly. New software license and cloud subscription revenue growth is expected to range from 0%-10%. Hardware product revenue growth is expected to range from 0%-10%.
As a result, total revenue growth on both GAAP and non-GAAP basis is expected to range from 3%-7% in reported dollars. Non-GAAP EPS is expected to be somewhere between $0.92 and $0.99 in constant dollars and in reported dollars. GAAP EPS is expected to be $0.79-$0.86. Now, I want to remind you that last year, we recognized an acquisition-related benefit of $269 million in connection with the Pillar Data Systems earn out. Excluding that benefit, GAAP EPS last Q4 would have been $0.74. This guidance assumes a GAAP tax rate of 21.5% and a non-GAAP tax rate of 23.5%. Of course, it may end up being different. Finally, my guidance does not take into account any additional non-operating remeasurement losses as a result of exchange rate changes in Venezuela. With that, I'll turn it over to Larry for his comments.
Thank you, Safra. Oracle's engineered systems, including Exadata and SPARC SuperCluster, achieved a 30% constant currency growth rate in the quarter. While throughout the industry, traditional high-end server product lines are in steep decline. Our engineered systems business is growing rapidly for the same fundamental reason that our cloud applications business is growing rapidly. In both cases, customers want us to integrate the hardware and software and make it work together so they don't have to. As customers shift to pre-integrated hardware and cloud computing in search of lower costs and more rapid implementations, Oracle is presented with new opportunities for leadership in a number of market categories. 5 years ago, we delivered our first Exadata machine. In the next few months, we will deliver our 10,000th engineered system. We believe Oracle's engineered systems are well on their way to replacing IBM P-Series as the leader in high-end computing.
Eight years ago, we started to rewrite all of our applications for the cloud. Now those Fusion ERP, HCM, and CRM cloud applications are competing effectively with SaaS product specialists like Salesforce and Workday. SAP has not yet begun to rewrite their ERP, HCM, and CRM applications for the cloud. This gives us the opportunity to become the leader in cloud applications and replace SAP as the leader in the overall applications marketplace. Strong sales of our cloud applications, engineered systems, and 12c database demonstrate that Oracle is successfully exploiting the transition to the new generation of cloud computing and big data.
Sure. Just a couple of comments. Solid results for us in Europe and North America. Latin America was very strong for us, while Asia Pac was mixed. Japan had a solid quarter. In cloud, this was our best quarter ever. Excellent bookings growth, more than 60%. The booking growth more than doubled the revenue growth, as we're just winning in the cloud across all portfolios. Contract sizes are growing. More than 65 seven or eight-figure deals, with many driven by Fusion HCM and Sales Cloud. We're seeing good growth from acquired cloud offerings, and Fusion Cloud growth was even better, with HCM, Sales Automation, and ERP all up triple digits. In HCM, we added 250 customers, or roughly four to five times the number reported by Workday. We're seeing excellent growth across all solutions, Core HR, Payroll, and Talent Cloud. Double-digit growth in Taleo and triple-digit growth in Fusion HCM.
In ERP, triple-digit growth with a bigger customer base than Workday, and we're growing faster, period. In customer experience, we added more than 260 new customers with strong growth across all our solutions, Marketing, Sales, Service, and Social Clouds. Our 60%-plus cloud booking growth is considerably higher than salesforce.com. Our Fusion products are now on release eight, with 1,000 new features in that release with improvements. Coming with release nine again this summer will be a similar number of new features. So release eight, 1,000 new features, release nine this summer with roughly the same number of features. Along with Responsys and BlueKai soon, we continue to gain momentum on the product side, the customer side, and you will see this in our financial performance. In hardware, 10% overall growth. We grew in every single region. We're growing while our competitors are declining.
We're taking share, and we've created a new category in high-end computing, engineered systems. As Larry mentioned, soon we will have sold more than 10,000 engineered systems, and our 32% growth rate this quarter is against a meaningful comparison. In fact, Q3 last year was the all-time record at that time for systems sold. All major engineered systems products grew double digits. SPARC SuperCluster saw triple-digit growth again this quarter. Both the T Server and NAS storage saw good growth. Combined with engineered systems, these products now make up nearly two-thirds of all product revenue and grow roughly 20%. Database continues to show strong performance, and we've not yet begun to see the coming benefits of 12c, which will help drive license growth. Middleware was very strong as well, with double-digit growth led by excellent performance in data analytics.
Cloud and engineered systems are two hypergrowth businesses inside the largest cash flow company in enterprise technology. With that, we'll take whatever questions you've got.
Kelly?
Thank you.
Can I, please?
At this time, if you do have a question, please signal us by pressing star one. Again, for questions, that will be star one. We'll go first to Karl Keirstead with Deutsche Bank.
Oh, thank you. My question is for Mark. I guess the stronger momentum in Oracle's cloud software bookings and revenue growth really jump out at me among the data points in the release. I know you gave some good color by product. Wondering if you might add a little bit more depth, help us understand what the broader drivers were. Was it Oracle doing a better job cross-selling on acquisitions? Was it the better functionality in Fusion version 7? Maybe any other factors that you think are worth highlighting. Thank you.
The good news I'd tell you is that we're just better at almost every part of this. I really don't know how I could say it to you. I think we thought we knew a lot a year ago or a couple of years ago. We just know a lot more now. We're better from a product perspective. I talked to you a little bit about what we've got in release 8. It's 1,000 new features across the entire release. Big jump from a product perspective. We obviously have more feet on the street than we had, and certainly not just more feet on the street, but they've been in place longer. They've been now trained multiple times, and clearly the perception in the market now has improved about our cloud position.
I think last quarter, our 35% growth was good news, and clearly this 60% growth is even better news. I think that will help us as well. It is broad-based, Karl. There's no one deal in here. There's no one product line that drove it. It's really across all of our product lines. As I mentioned, our Fusion products or organic Fusion products really had a fantastic quarter. Fusion HCM, Fusion Sales Automation, and Fusion ERP were all three very strong. It's really true across most regions as well. I don't have a region story that would be unique to the growth rate. It was fairly consistent across all regions. I hope that's helpful.
Good. Thank you.
We'll move next to Raimo Lenschow with Barclays.
Hey, thanks for taking my question. The other area that stood out this quarter was hardware, it's a bit puzzling because if you look at the IBM numbers, they are declining quite significantly. You mentioned some of the drivers there already. Can you just go a little bit deeper in there? Also how you see that, we've been waiting for a turnaround in hardware for a while, now all the things that you're talking are coming through. Is that something sustainable, and how do you see that playing out against the competition going forward? Thank you.
Well, it's absolutely sustainable because engineered systems has been growing rapidly for a long time. We keep talking about it.
The problem a couple years ago was engineered systems was a small percentage of the total. Engineered systems has grown up to be over 30% of the total. Soon it's going to be half of the total. That's very positive. The x86 commodity business, which used to be a big business when we bought Sun, has now shrunk to almost nothing. Our hardware business has gone through the transition where we've gotten out of the commodity storage business, we've gotten out of the commodity server business and replaced it with computing systems with a lot of our own intellectual property. These businesses are growing rapidly and have very good margins. The reason we compete with IBM P-Series all the time head to head, it's not uncommon for our systems to be several times faster than IBM.
Let me give you one example without saying who the competitor was. We replaced a system in the world's largest cloud company. You guys can figure out who that is. World's largest cloud company. We delivered an Exadata system to them. They moved their application and got it live in three weeks and experienced 10 times better performance at a fraction of the cost. This is not uncommon when we install an Exadata machine or a SPARC SuperCluster to have a very rapid implementation, deliver terrific performance, and at a dramatically lower overall cost because all of the complexity of integration is done by us, not by them.
I'd add to your comment. You asked if it was sustainable. What I'd hope you'd be encouraged by was if you looked at our performance over the past several quarters, you've seen the reflection of our execution of our strategy in hardware support. You've seen hardware support continue to incline year-over-year and sequentially, in terms of its performance. We grew now 7% in Q3, which is a reflection of what Larry described. The fact that there is higher Oracle IP directly relates to our attach rates and eventually what turns into hardware support. We now have our core businesses that have all been refreshed, and that's why I mentioned it. Our T systems, our network attached storage or ZFS storage, and our engineered systems are now almost 70% of our revenue, and all three of those are growing, and they are gaining share. Is it sustainable?
Listen, I can't predict the macro, but I can predict we will continue to gain share. To add to Larry's point, we just don't compete with the server vendors. We actually do a lot of other things than just compete with an IBM. We compete with EMC, frankly, when we get into those environments, because we radically change our customer storage requirements. If our customer's got a petabyte of storage, we know how to compress that data with Exadata to where they may only need to use 100 terabytes. This opportunity for us to now change the game in the way people think about how they use their infrastructure is, in my opinion, long-term, a very sustainable strategy. We've got differentiation, and that's what we're using.
Perfect. Very clear.
We'll hear now from Jason Maynard with Wells Fargo.
Hey, good afternoon. I had a two-parter question for you. The first part is, Larry, maybe talk a little bit about 12c and how you think it influences the hardware business next year. I know the C can stand for cloud, but I'd be curious to get your take on the consolidation opportunity. As part of that, Safra made a quick comment about, I think, the renewal rates in your largest revenue line around license update and support, and I'd love to get a little more color from there in how you're seeing 12c influence maintenance renewals and customers subscribing for support. Thank you.
Okay. I'll start with 12c in terms of its rate of uptake there. There are two key aspects of 12c. One that came out with the initial release, which is the multi-tenant feature. That's why it's called 12c for the cloud. It literally takes any application that you've got, any Oracle application you've got, and makes it a multi-tenant application. Even companies like salesforce.com, we're both a supplier to salesforce.com and a competitor with salesforce.com. I just recently got a note from Marc Benioff, who's excited about bringing in Exadata and 12c and making that the basis of salesforce.com's cloud computing infrastructure that they put their application on. We're seeing adopters with very high standards in terms of having to supply millions of users reliably and cost effectively in the cloud, talk about moving their entire business to 12c and Exadata.
That's just the tip of the iceberg, these hyperscale companies. We think virtually all of our customers are on their way to moving to 12c. There's the early adopters, and then there's the rest of the guys that come down the road a bit later. We think it's very attractive to our conventional customers and to hyperscale customers like Salesforce and others. The second piece is the in-memory piece. We think that it comes out this summer, comes out June, basically June, July, August, something like that. We think that's going to accelerate the adoption of 12c a lot. I think the performance gains there are so dramatic.
We think even the people who like to wait a while for the new features and maybe wait six months or a year before they try it out, there are hundreds of people trying it out now before it's even released. We think this is a unique feature in terms of being able to have a huge payoff right away. We think 12c will be the most rapidly adopted new release in many years for those two reasons, in-memory and multi-tenancy features. I'll let Safra comment about the renewal rates.
Well, the renewal rates in database are always extremely strong. Folks make really long-term bets on our database. Because we just continue to provide the kind of innovation Larry's talking about, they always renew. It doesn't make sense not to. They get just so much enormous value. We continue to invest in the database, as Larry just mentioned, and as a result, renewal rates remain extremely high for the database, for all our products, to be frank, but database is always great, and it remained again that way this quarter and all year.
Next question, please.
We'll hear now from Heather Bellini with Goldman Sachs.
Thank you, and good afternoon. Mark, I was just wondering if you could elaborate a little bit more on the comments you made about modern middleware and data analytics. If you could help highlight your strategy for us as well as if you can go over with us your competitive positioning.
Sure, yeah. As I mentioned, the middleware growth was strong. Underneath it, data analytics was very strong. Our growth in data analytics was, in the tech part of data analytics, was greater than 40%, so it's a big number now. We've done several things. One, we've seen a couple of shifts. First, we've added a lot of salespeople. Second, with the addition of our Endeca product line or our addition of Exalytics, we've brought a lot of new technology to the space. We've also seen the competitors that we compete with shift.
Traditionally, Oracle would see Business Objects and Cognos, we actually see Tableau a lot more than we see those two at this point. Frankly, I think the integration work we've done with Endeca, with Exalytics has paid off. The salespeople we've brought have paid off, and you see it show up in our results. There are other things in middleware, Heather, that perform very well as well, but of materiality, that's probably the one to call out, which is data analytics.
If I could just add one thing to that. With the release of Oracle Database In-Memory with 12c, our data analytics performance is going to increase by more than a factor of 10. Some cases, about more than a factor of 100. We think this summer with 12c, our data analytics business is going to take off.
Of course, the intention is to sell a lot of those data analytics products in the cloud as opposed to on-premise. We will give customers a choice, but we'll offer that, those data analytics in the cloud, data analytics on-premise. It's a big push for us. As Mark said, we see new competitors and an opportunity, once again, to move to the front of the pack to become the number one data analytics company in the world. We think the new competitors are small and innovative. The old competitors have a lot of market share, and we think that market share is there for the taking as long as we can deliver high-quality technology, and that's what we'll do this summer.
I should have mentioned that too, to Larry, triggered that thought. We did announce some BI offerings in the cloud in the quarter.
While not yet a material part of our revenue, an awful exciting offering to add to everything else that I and Larry mentioned in terms of what we're bringing to the market. We're excited about the space. We think there's opportunity for us to gain material share here.
Thank you.
Rick Sherlund with Nomura has our next question.
Thanks. For Larry, can you update us on your progress in delivering your infrastructure stack in the cloud delivered as platform as a service, and are there any metrics you can give us on the traction that you're seeing there?
Yeah. Well, it's available on a limited basis right now. It's going to be available in both infrastructure as a service and platform as a service. We've done all the pricing. The infrastructure as a service is going to be priced pretty much equivalent to Amazon. We think that's a commodity business and not in any way in a bad sense. To play that game, we're going to have a compute service and a storage service. The storage service is already out. The compute service is going to be released en masse shortly. That will be very competitive, we think, with Amazon or anybody else in this business. The big differentiator for us is along with infrastructure as a service, we have a very strong platform as a service offering coming out with our infrastructure, and that's, of course, our two major platform plays.
In middleware, it's Java, and the database, of course, is Oracle. We think that gives us a unique pair of differentiators, and the infrastructure platform as a service is taken together. We think that's what our customers are going to do. The customer's going to come to us and buy our platform in the cloud and buy infrastructure in the cloud and move a lot of their existing applications Off out of their own data centers into our cloud, and they can do that without having to change their applications at all. They can move their applications intact to our cloud and get all of the cost benefits, all of the efficiencies of scale, and they don't have to change the apps at all. We think that's a unique proposition we offer our customers. Again, delivery time is all this summer.
Next question, please.
That will be from Phil Winslow with Credit Suisse.
Hi. Thanks, guys. Just want to build on that last question on the cloud. At Open World, you guys talked about some metrics in terms of Fusion applications in the cloud and the percentage of customers that are choosing a cloud-based deployment of Fusion. I wonder if you could comment on just what you've been seeing over the past few quarters there. Also just competitively with Fusion in the cloud, what are you seeing out there versus Workday, versus salesforce.com, and now that Fusion apps and Fusion apps in the cloud have been out there for obviously multiple quarters?
I'll take that. I think what you asked was the deployment of Fusion on-premise versus cloud. I think that's what you asked, and it's cloud. Let me go through that one more time, cloud is generally where Fusion is deployed. We've had great success with it. We've had great adoption. I think one of the things that's important, I've seen some opinions, I won't credit a source, that our growth rates, these exciting growth rates we're describing are coming from acquired properties as opposed to Fusion activities. I want to make sure I'm clear, Phil, to refute that. It doesn't mean I love acquired properties, too, so I love them all. I just want to make sure it's clear in the numbers that our Fusion products are growing very fast, faster than our overall growth rate.
As it relates to your conversation about Workday, I tried to be as transparent as I could be. We've got the good fortune that they're transparent, in most cases, although I didn't get to see their customer list this quarter. In previous quarters, I hear their numbers, and we just have more new customers than they do. That seems like a good metric to me, and we'll continue to see as we move going forward. We're very comfortable competing with them. We felt very good about release seven. As I told you, we're now on release eight. We're very comfortable with that product. We've gotten our sales organization trained, and we're very comfortable competing with them. Of course, we're growing off a bigger base than them. With Salesforce, we do all of what Larry described. We compete with them.
They're a customer at the same time. In sales automation, we're competing with them. We had very strong growth in Fusion sales auto in the quarter, and we're very comfortable with also our position in Service Cloud. That's right now acquired product, but we feel very good about both. We've added now also the capability in marketing. We bought a leading marketing automation company in B2B in Eloqua. We supplemented that with the leading B2C company in Responsys, and we've now announced our intention to acquire BlueKai. We believe we have a leadership position in marketing automation, leadership position in service automation. We're on the attack in sales automation, although clearly number two to Salesforce at that point.
We believe the ecosystem we've now laid out is second to no one in the leading position in the marketplace, and I think it's showing up in our results.
Great. Thanks, guys.
Next question, please.
That will be from Kash Rangan with Merrill Lynch.
Hi. Thank you very much. First, Mark, any tweaks? What are the things that are working successfully from a sales execution go-to-market standpoint that you plan on emphasizing as you look at your business next year? One for you, Safra, deferred revenue is down sequentially. Can you expand upon what might have contributed to that? Thank you very much.
I'll start and let Saf finish. We've obviously added a lot of capacity. We feel very good about the capacity we've added. We're very focused on those people being very productive. What you see us investing a lot now is training. I probably mentioned training three times during this call. As our product set continues to get better and better, and our salespeople now have more time in seat, training is a big deal. Now, we will add people next year. Larry talked about some exciting stuff we now have in platform and infrastructure. You'll see us add salespeople, and as we start to compete with, again, a new competitor as it relates to platform and infrastructure. You'll see us do some supplemental adding in some other places with a real keen focus, Kash, on productivity and making these people.
You can imagine against the size of our sales force, we have billions of dollars of revenue associated with the productivity gains we can make with the capacity we now have in this company from a sales perspective.
If I can add one thing, just to scale it, as we roll out platform as a service and infrastructure as a service, we will have specialists selling nothing but platform as a service and nothing but infrastructure as a service. We'll have someplace between 500 and 1,000 of them that we're going to add next fiscal year, starting with the class. This is around the world. Again, we go back to this thing there that we have a new set of competitors. We need specialist sales teams that are used to competing with Amazon. Other specialist sales teams that are used to competing with IBM P-Series. It's a different sale to a different customer quite often. We're lining up against all of our new competitors and making sure we have sales capacity as well as a competitive product.
Okay, Kash, the Q3 deferred revenues are following the exact same seasonal patterns that they always follow, including last year. Though they're sequentially down, that's really because Q4 is the peak for support renewals, et cetera, and it always goes down from Q2 to Q3 sequentially. I do want to remind you, of course, that it's up over $200 million over the same quarter last year, and that's really what you should be looking at. There's nothing going on as far as burning down or whatever. It's simply the same thing we have every Q3, where it's just as it burns down the big Q4 renewals, and it shows up right there in that line. That's it.
Next question, please.
That will come from Macquarie's, Brad Zelnick.
Thank you very much. Larry, big data is obviously a huge opportunity for Oracle, given your strength in database and traction with engineered systems. From an apps perspective, can you talk about the opportunity to differentiate and drive growth by leveraging big data within the apps themselves? Do you see big data as more of its own category or a feature of next-generation applications?
I think it's an underlying category. For example, there's no doubt that in-memory databases allow us to analyze large amounts of data more quickly. The fact that our Exadata machines have multiple tiers of caching. We now not only have DRAM and rotating storage, we have a lot of flash memory that we have to manage. It allows us to manage huge databases, multi-petabyte databases, and deliver very high performance. No, we think of big data as an underlying set of technologies. For batch, if you want a big data batch process, the open source product, Hadoop, is a very good product if you're doing batch processing. If you're doing big data real-time processing, we think the Oracle database is by far and away the best technology for managing real-time processing of big data.
We think this is a category where we're already the leader. In fact, we're gaining on our competitors. If you look at all of our database competitors, both relational and non-relational databases, we're taking share both on the SQL area, we're growing a lot faster than the NoSQL area. We're very comfortable that the improvements we've made to our database will allow us to prosper in the big data era. Of course, any application then written on top of Oracle can exploit that data, and that application becomes enriched. Our telecommunications billing system, which has to manage huge amounts of transactions with millions and millions of customers, be able to figure out whether to cut off a phone call when someone exceeds their bill and do all of that real-time. That's real-time processing of huge amounts of data by a phone company.
Those are the kind of applications we provide that almost no one else can provide.
Thank you.
Our final question today will be from Brad Reback with Stifel.
Great. Thanks very much. Safra, year-to-date, CapEx spending is down about 9%. I know in the past you've been fairly adamant about not needing to really ramp up CapEx like a lot of your competitors have had. Given the really strong 60% bookings growth in cloud, has any of the thinking changed there?
Remember, we have enormous scale that we have not fully tapped. We've been making investments this whole time. So we will continue to invest as we do now. We have obviously some visibility into our contracts that we've signed, we have so much scale that we've been investing in for years, much of it still available. So we're very comfortable where we're at right now, and we budgeted to it. I don't think you'll be seeing any massive gapping just because our size is so large. Because we have our own hardware, we have our own systems, we can really thoroughly optimize for our applications with compression and all these other things that other folks just don't have the benefit and luxury that we have.
Yeah. We think with our engineered systems and our data compression technology, we can deliver the same storage and the same compute capacity of our competitors for a lot less money. We're selling this technology to our customers. That's our pitch. We think we can build our own data centers just as efficiently, that's why I don't think you'll ever see our CapEx approach our infrastructure competitors in the cloud.
No.
Thanks very much.
Thank you. A telephonic replay of this conference call will be available for 24 hours. Dial-in information can be released in the press release issued earlier today. Please call the investor relations department with any follow-up questions from this call, and we look forward to speaking with you. Thank you for joining us today. With that, I'll turn the call back to the operator for closing.
Again, that will conclude today's conference. We thank you all for joining us.