Oracle Q4 Earnings: Ellison Criticizes Salesforce Over Product Integration

Customers ‘will sometimes pick our front office applications over Salesforce,’ Oracle CTO Larry Ellison says.

Larry Ellison, Oracle co-founder and chief technology officer, criticized the company led by his one-time employee Marc Benioff as offering products that aren’t as well integrated as those from Ellison’s own company during Oracle’s latest quarterly earnings call.

Ellison’s comments were notable in part because Benioff himself has frequently compared Salesforce’s AI capabilities against Microsoft, sometimes asserting that the Salesforce platform’s level of integration leads to better AI-powered results compared to that Microsoft’s Copilot and other AI products can produce.

Salesforce analysts–and solution providers in past interviews with CRN–have sometimes criticized the vendor for slower integration of newly acquired companies.

Customers “will sometimes pick our front office applications over Salesforce as a result of” the integration among Oracle enterprise resource planning (ERP), supply chain, human capital and other products, Oracle’s Ellison said on Wednesday’s call.

Oracle executives reported the vendor’s earnings for the last quarter of its 2025 fiscal year, which ended May 31

“Our customer engagement applications are getting better and better,” Ellison said. “Everything is in the same database. Everything comes with the same AI data platform with it. All the analytics are there. Everything is there. You don’t have to do the system integration. You don’t have to buy a bunch of pieces and make them work together.”

Oracle Q4 Earnings

Oracle’s NetSuite division is part of CRN’s 2025 Partner Program Guide. Benioff left a 13-year tenure at Oracle in 1999 to co-found Salesforce. CRN has reached out to Salesforce for comment.

In May, Benioff defended his pending purchase of data management vendor Informatica as a way to “harmonize or activate all the data across the entire enterprise” and deliver the best AI results through agents, data, apps and metadata.

“Every company does say that they have agents, but without these four parts … you’re just not really able to deliver this complete experience for the enterprise, including delivering digital labor,” Benioff said.

Oracle Reports No Slowdown

On Wednesday, Oracle became the latest technology giant to report no hindrance to customer AI demand despite economic uncertainty as countries negotiate global tariffs, with company executives raising the revenue it expects this fiscal year by $1 billion and seeing increased demand for cloud products by customers who want to take advantage of AI and AI agents.

Safra Catz, CEO of the Austin, Texas-based database products and cloud vendor, said on Wednesday’s quarterly earnings call that using cloud ERP products such as Oracle’s NetSuite and Fusion instead of on-premises products is the only way to fully unlock AI capabilities.

“Many customers are still on on-premise ERP products,” said Catz. “Those can’t really use the advanced agentic and AI capabilities.”

Ellison added that the AI era should push customers to consolidate technology vendors, a benefit to Oracle and its apps that work together spanning supply chain, ERP, customer engagement and other use cases.

“Companies don’t really enjoy buying applications from five different vendors and then making all of those applications work together,” Ellison said.

Ellison appeared to continue attacking Salesforce’s assertion as a premiere AI vendor because of the enterprise customer data its products house for customers–although Ellison didn’t mention Salesforce by name.

“These other companies say they have all the data, so they can do AI really well,” Ellison said. “They can build all these AI agents on top of all of that data. The only problem with that statement is they don’t have all the data. We do. We have most of the world’s valuable data. The vast majority of it is in an Oracle database.”

Oracle’s latest database version is “AI centric” with data vectorized and searchable, Ellison said. Data inside Oracle applications can leverage leading AI models for insights that incorporate company data. And enterprises will trust Oracle databases that are highly scalable, secure and reliable 24 hours a day.

“We are the key enabler for enterprises to use their own data and AI models,” he said. “No one else is doing that. … This is not a small point. This is why our database business is going to grow dramatically.”

Non-AI, Multi-Cloud Growth

Ellison told analysts that Oracle’s business has seen large non-AI contracts as well, including one with Temu that moves the China-based online marketplace’s infrastructure to Oracle Cloud.

Oracle has also seen “astonishing” growth in multi-cloud sales, the CTO said. Multi-cloud database revenue from Oracle’s partnerships with Amazon, Google and Microsoft more than doubled from the third fiscal quarter to the fourth, according to the vendor.

About 20 multi-cloud data centers are live with 47 being built over the next 12 months. The vendor has about 30 Oracle Cloud@Customer data centers live. Another 30 should be built in the current fiscal year. Oracle Cloud Infrastructure (OCI) consumption revenue grew 62 percent in the fourth fiscal quarter. Oracle predicts triple-digit multi-cloud revenue growth to continue in fiscal year 2026.

“That’s given our customers a lot of comfort that Oracle is not only where they store all of their current data, but they want to keep using the Oracle database and expand their use of the Oracle database and move all of that and move all of that data to the cloud as quickly as they can,” he said. “They’re now able to do it (in) the cloud of their choosing.”

High demand was a contributor to Oracle’s higher-than-expected capital expenditures. The vendor reported $21.2 billion in CapEx for the fiscal year and $9.1 billion in the fourth fiscal quarter. Catz said to expect more than $25 billion in CapEx in fiscal year 2026.

Catz stressed that most of that CapEx is for equipment that generates revenue, not land or building. “We don’t build unless we’ve got orders for our capacity to be built out,” she said.

Ellison added that Oracle is making “large engineering investments” to speed up networking and lower the cost of networking. The vendor is not having trouble getting graphics processing units (GPUs).

Stargate Updates

Oracle CEO Safra Catz stressed to analysts on the call that the $500 billion Stargate AI infrastructure partnership by Oracle, Microsoft-backed OpenAI and investment giant SoftBank “is still in formation.”

But Oracle is still seeing plenty of business, with its data center supply still not meeting the high volume of customer demand.

“We are the destination for everyone who wants AI workloads, who want database workloads and want applications,” Catz said. “We have so much in pipeline right now.”

Ellison added that if “Stargate turns out to be everything is advertised, then we’ve understated our RPO growth.” For now, Oracle expects its remaining performance obligations (RPO) to more than double year over year in fiscal year 2026.

Oracle Q4 In Depth

The vendor reported $138 billion in RPO, up 41 percent year over year. Its total revenue for the fourth fiscal quarter was $15.9 billion, up 11 percent year over year. Cloud services and license support revenue totaled $11.7 billion, up 14 percent year over year. Cloud license and on-premises license revenues reached $2 billion for the quarter, up 8 percent year over year ignoring foreign exchange.

Catz said that license revenue growth means that customers “want to use the bring-your-own-license pricing to go to the cloud.”

Cloud revenue was $6.7 billion, up 27 percent year over year. Cloud infrastructure contributed $3 billion, up 52 percent year over year. The rest was in cloud application revenue, up 12 percent year over year.

Oracle’s Fusion Cloud ERP offer brought in $1 billion during the quarter, up 22 percent. NetSuite Cloud ERP brought in $1 billion, up 18 percent year over year.

Oracle reported operating income of $5.1 billion using Generally Accepted Accounting Principles (GAAP). Net income was $3.4 billion.

FY2025 Results, FY2026 Predictions

As for the fiscal year, Oracle reported total revenue of $57.4 billion, up 8 percent year over year. Cloud services and license support revenues totaled $44 billion, up 12 percent year over year. Cloud license and on-premises license revenues were $5.2 billion, up 3 percent year over year ignoring foreign exchange.

Oracle brought in $17.7 billion in GAAP operating income for fiscal year 2025. Net income was $12.4 billion.

The vendor predicts total cloud growth rate–which includes cloud apps and infrastructure–to grow from 24 percent in the fiscal year that just ended to 40-plus percent in fiscal year 2026.

Catz raised Oracle’s fiscal year 2026 revenue guidance by more than $1 billion, now expecting more than $67 billion, up 16 percent year over year.

Cloud infrastructure growth rate should go from 50 percent in fiscal year 2025 to 70-plus percent next fiscal year.

For the first fiscal quarter, Oracle predicts total revenue growth between 11 percent and 13 percent ignoring foreign exchange. Total cloud revenue is expected to grow from 26 percent to 30 percent.

Oracle’s stock traded at about $189 a share after market close Wednesday, up about 7 percent.