That's because Oracle needs to raise customer interest in the "engineered systems" notion, upon which it is staking the hardware business acquired through the purchase of Sun Microsystems, rather than compete in the commodity server market.

Hardware revenues in 24 percent to $779 million, repeating a pattern of decline since the Sun deal closed. While Oracle has emphasized that Exadata, Exalogic and its other appliances are much more profitable than commodity servers, investors may soon become restless for the company to show top-line revenue growth in hardware.

The IDG News Service