The company's own description of what it does — segments, products, customers, and how it makes money — from its annual 10-K filing (Item 1).
The text below is reproduced verbatim from ORCL’s SEC filing. See also ORCL’s supply chain and financial statements.
Item 1.
Business Oracle provides products and services that address enterprise information technology (IT) environments. Our products and services include enterprise 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@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. Using Oracle technologies, our customers build, deploy, run, manage and support their internal and external products, services and business operations including, for example, a global cloud applications developer that utilizes Oracle Cloud Infrastructure (OCI) to power its software-as-a-service (SaaS) offerings; a multi-national financial institution that runs its banking applications using the Oracle Exadata Database Machine; and a global consumer products company that leverages Oracle Fusion Cloud Enterprise Resource Planning for its accounting processes, consolidation and financial planning functions.Oracle Cloud Services offerings, which include Oracle SaaS and OCI offerings, provide comprehensive and integrated applications and infrastructure services delivered via cloud-based deployment models. Oracle Cloud Services integrate the IT components, including software, hardware and services, on a customer’s behalf in a cloud-based IT environment that Oracle deploys, manages, supports and upgrades for the customer and that a customer may access utilizing common web browsers via a broad spectrum of devices. 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 products include Oracle Engineered Systems, servers, storage and industry-specific products, among others. Customers generally opt to purchase hardware support contracts when they purchase Oracle hardware products. 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, more restrictive deployment models and less flexibility for a customer’s transition to cloud-based IT environments.Our investments in, and innovation with respect to, Oracle products and services that we offer through our three businesses (cloud and license, hardware and services businesses, described further below) are another important element of our corporate strategy. In fiscal 2022, 2021 and 2020, we invested $7.2 billion, $6.5 billion and $6.1 billion, respectively, in research and development to enhance our existing portfolio of offerings 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 including through the use of OCI to power our Oracle Fusion SaaS Applications, which we and our customers use to run internal business processes. We focus our development efforts on improving the performance, security, operation, integration and cost-effectiveness of our offerings relative to our competitors; facilitating the ease with which organizations are able to deploy, use, manage and maintain our offerings; and incorporating emerging technologies within our offerings to enable leaner business processes, automation and innovation. For example, the Oracle Autonomous Database is designed to deliver transformational infrastructure as an OCI offering that utilizes machine learning capabilities. After an initial purchase of Oracle products and services, our customers can continue to benefit from our offerings, 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. 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. We have invested billions of dollars over time to acquire a number of companies, products, services and technologies that add to, are complementary to, or have otherwise enhanced our existing offerings, including our acquisition of Cerner Corporation in June 2022 (see Note 2 of Notes to Consolidated Financial Statements included elsewhere in this Annual Report for additional information). We expect to continue to acquire companies, products, services and technologies to further our corporate strategy.We have three businesses, cloud and license, hardware, and services, and each is comprised of a single operating segment. Item 7 Management’s Discussion and Analysis of Financial Condition and Results of Operations and Note 14 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.