2013

Management’s Discussion and Analysis of Financial Condition and Results of Operations

We begin Management’s Discussion and Analysis of Financial Condition and Results of Operations with an overview of our key operating business segments and significant trends. This overview is followed by a summary of our critical accounting policies and estimates that we believe are important to understanding the assumptions and judgments incorporated in our reported financial results. We then provide a more detailed analysis of our results of operations and financial condition.

Business Overview

We are the world’s largest provider of enterprise software and a leading provider of computer hardware products and services that are engineered to work together in the cloud and in the data center. We are a leader in the core technologies of cloud computing, including database and middleware as well as web-based applications, virtualization, clustering and large-scale systems management. We provide cloud services as well as software and hardware products to other cloud service providers, both public and private. Oracle database and middleware software, applications software and hardware systems—including computer server, storage and networking products—are the building blocks of our own cloud services, our partners’ cloud services and our customers’ private cloud environments. Our customers can subscribe to use select Oracle software and hardware products through our cloud offerings, or purchase our software and hardware products and related services to build their own private cloud or on-premise information technology (IT) environments. Our strategy is to deliver reliable and scalable products and services that are built upon industry standards and are engineered to work together or independently. We also pursue new or emerging growth opportunities in order to maintain technology leadership. Offering customers a choice in how they use our products and services—while maintaining enterprise-grade reliability, security, and interoperability—is important to our corporate strategy.

We believe that internal growth and continued innovation with respect to our software, hardware and services businesses are the foundation of our long-term strategic plans. In fiscal 2013, we invested $4.9 billion, and in each of fiscal 2012 and 2011 we invested $4.5 billion, in research and development to enhance our existing portfolio of products and services and to develop new products and services. We continue to focus the engineering of our hardware and software products to make them work together more effectively and deliver improved computing performance, reliability and security to our customers. For example, Oracle Engineered Systems, which include our Oracle Exadata Database Machine, Oracle Exalogic Elastic Cloud and Oracle SPARC SuperCluster products, among others, combine certain of our hardware and software offerings in a way that increases computing performance relative to our competitors’ products, creating time savings, efficiencies and operational cost advantages for our customers. With products that are engineered to work together, our customers can reduce much