remained relatively constant since substantially all new software licenses transactions result in the sale of software license updates and product support contracts, which add to our software support contract base; and

	•	 	our acquisitions have increased our software support contract base, as well as the portfolio of products available to be licensed and supported.

We recorded adjustments to reduce software support obligations assumed in business combinations to their estimated fair values at the acquisition dates. As a result, as required by business combination accounting rules, we did not recognize software license updates and product support revenues related to software support contracts that would have been otherwise recorded by the acquired businesses as independent entities in the amounts of $14 million, $48 million and $80 million in fiscal 2013, 2012 and 2011, respectively. To the extent underlying software support contracts are renewed with us following an acquisition, we will recognize the revenues for the full values of the software support contracts over the respective support periods, the majority of which are one year.

Hardware Systems Business

Our hardware systems business is comprised of two operating segments: (1) hardware systems products and (2) hardware systems support. Our hardware business represented 14%, 17% and 19% of our total revenues in fiscal 2013, 2012 and 2011, respectively. We expect our hardware business to have lower operating margins as a percentage of revenues than our software business due to the incremental costs we incur to produce and distribute these products and to provide support services, including direct materials and labor costs. We expect to make investments in research and development to improve existing hardware products and services and to develop new hardware products and services.

Hardware Systems Products:     We provide a broad selection of hardware systems and related services including servers, storage, networking, virtualization software, operating systems, and management software to support diverse IT environments, including public and private cloud computing environments. We engineer our hardware systems with virtualization and management capabilities to enable the rapid deployment and efficient management of cloud and on-premise IT infrastructures. Our hardware products support many of the world’s largest public and private clouds, including the Oracle Cloud; our software development private cloud; and our Oracle University self-service private cloud.

We have also engineered our hardware systems products to create performance and operational cost advantages for customers when our hardware and software products are combined as Oracle Engineered Systems. Oracle Engineered Systems are core building blocks for Oracle’s data center and cloud computing products and services. Oracle Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS), an on-premise cloud offering for deploying Oracle’s Engineered Systems to customers on a subscription basis, provides our customers with flexibility in deployment models and allows our customers to cost effectively handle peak computing workloads with capacity on