2007

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

We are the world’s largest enterprise software company. We are organized into two businesses, software and services, which are further divided into five operating segments. Each of these operating segments has unique characteristics and faces different opportunities and challenges. Although we report our actual results in United States dollars, we conduct a significant number of transactions in currencies other than United States dollars. Therefore, we present constant currency information to provide a framework for assessing how our underlying business performed excluding the effect of foreign currency rate fluctuations. An overview of our five operating segments follows.

 

Software Business

 

Our software business is comprised of two operating segments: (1) new software license revenues and (2) software license updates and product support revenues. We expect that our software business revenues will continue to increase, which should allow us to improve margins and 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 is affected by the strength of general economic and business conditions, governmental budgetary constraints, the competitive position of our software products and acquisitions. The 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 revenues on a trailing 4-quarter period provides more visibility into the underlying fundamental performance of our software revenues than analysis of quarterly revenues. New software license revenues represented 33% of our total revenues in fiscal 2007. Our new software license margins have been affected by the amortization of intangible assets associated with companies we have acquired.

 

Competition in the software business is intense. Our goal is to maintain a first or second position in each of our software product categories and certain industry segments as well as to grow our software revenues faster than our competitors. We believe that the features and functionality of our software products are as strong as they have ever been. We have focused on lowering the total cost of ownership of our software products by improving integration, decreasing installation times, lowering administration costs and improving the ease of use. Reducing the total cost of ownership of our products provides our customers with a higher return on their investment, which we believe will create more demand for our products and services and provide us with a competitive advantage. We have also continued to focus on