of our software products, our acquisitions and foreign currency fluctuations. 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 31%, 34% and 33% of our total revenues in fiscal 2009, 2008 and 2007, respectively. Our new software license margins have historically trended upward over the course of the four quarters within a particular fiscal year due to the historical upward trend of our new software license revenues over those quarterly periods and because the majority of our costs are predominantly fixed in the short term. However, our new software license margins have been and will continue to be affected by the amortization of intangible assets associated with companies that 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. In addition, our broad portfolio of product offerings (many of which have been acquired in recent years) helps us to offer customers the ability to gain efficiencies by consolidating their IT “software stack” with a single vendor, which reduces the number of disparate software vendors with which customers interact. Reducing the total cost of ownership of our products provides our customers with a higher return on their IT investments, which we believe creates more demand for our products and services and provides us with a competitive advantage. We have also continued to focus on improving the overall quality of our software products and service levels. We believe this will lead to higher customer satisfaction and loyalty and help us achieve our goal of becoming our customers’ leading technology advisor.



Software License Updates and Product Support:   Customers that purchase software license updates and product support are granted rights to unspecified product upgrades and maintenance releases issued during the support period, as well as technical support assistance. In addition, we offer Oracle Unbreakable Linux Support, which provides enterprise level support for the Linux operating system, and also offer support for our Oracle VM server virtualization software. Substantially all of our customers renew their