revenues and earnings, and increases stockholder value. In recent years, we have invested billions of dollars to acquire a number of companies, products, services and technologies that add to, are complementary to, or have otherwise enhanced our existing offerings. We expect to continue to acquire companies, products, services and technologies in furtherance of our corporate strategy.

We are organized into three businesses—software, hardware systems and services—which are further divided into seven operating segments. Each of these businesses and operating segments has unique characteristics and faces different opportunities and challenges. Although we report our actual results in U.S. Dollars, we conduct a significant number of transactions in currencies other than U.S. Dollars. Therefore, we present constant currency information to provide a framework for assessing how our underlying businesses performed excluding the effect of foreign currency rate fluctuations. An overview of our three businesses and seven operating segments follows.

Software Business

Our software business, which represented 68%, 77% and 81% of our total revenues in fiscal 2011, 2010 and 2009, respectively, is comprised of two operating segments: (1) new software licenses and (2) software license updates and product support. On a constant currency basis, we expect that our software business’ total revenues generally will continue to increase due to continued demand for our software products and software license updates and product support offerings, including the high percentage of customers that renew their software license updates and product support contracts, and due to our acquisitions, which should allow us to grow our profits and continue to make investments in research and development.

New Software Licenses:     We license our database and middleware as well as our applications software to businesses of many sizes, government agencies, educational institutions and resellers. The growth in new software license revenues that we report is affected by the strength of general economic and business conditions, governmental budgetary constraints, the competitive position of our software products, our acquisitions and foreign currency fluctuations. The substantial majority of our new software license business is also characterized by long sales cycles. The timing of a few large software license transactions can substantially affect our quarterly new software license revenues. Since our new software license revenues in a particular quarter can be difficult to predict as a result of the timing of a few large software license transactions, we believe that analysis of new software license revenues on a trailing 4-quarter period (as provided in our Quarterly Reports on Form 10-Q) provides additional visibility into the underlying performance of our new software license business. New software license revenues represented 26%, 28% and 31% of our total revenues in fiscal 2011, 2010 and 2009, respectively. The proportion of our new software license revenues relative to our total revenues in fiscal 2011 and 2010 was affected by our entry into the hardware systems business as a