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 77%, 81% and 80% of our total revenues in fiscal 2010, 2009 and 2008, 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. As a result of our acquisition of Sun, we acquired certain software technologies, including Java, which is a global software development platform used in a wide range of computers, networks and devices.

 

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 28%, 31% and 34% of our total revenues in fiscal 2010, 2009 and 2008, respectively. The proportion of our new software license revenues relative to our total revenues in fiscal 2010 was affected by our entry into the hardware systems business as a result of our acquisition of Sun. Our new software license segment’s 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 for this segment are predominantly fixed in the short term. However, our new software license