Among other things, he thinks the company is feeling the pinch on its core relational database business from SAP's HANA in-memory computing approach.
"Tactically, our recent work suggests the engineered systems strategy is facing greater challenges and in general our field work has been underwhelming, though not as negative as last quarter," he writes in a research note. "We also have increased concerns that the relational database is facing multiple threats including SAP's HANA, increased adoption of SaaS by enterprise customers (especially [of] Salesforce.com and Workday) and the potential risk of disruption from new approaches to analyzing large volumes of unstructured data."
The Jefferies analyst contends that Oracle is seeing challenges with its engineered system strategy. He asserts that Exadata adoption "has moderated," that Oracle Database Appliance adoption has not been as strong as expected and that the company's Exalogic systems are "still seeking a viable use case." He adds that he is "concerned that the strategy is not playing out to plan with implications for growth."
Meanwhile he contends that HANA now offers a viable alternative to Oracle's relational database software.
ORCL on Friday rose 6 cents, to $30.13.
See also my interview last week with SAP Co-Chairman Jim Hagemann Snabe.
