2011

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, including changes to our business as a result of our acquisition of Sun Microsystems, Inc. (Sun) in fiscal 2010. 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 enterprise software company and a leading provider of computer hardware products and services. We develop, manufacture, market, distribute and service database and middleware software; applications software; and hardware systems, consisting primarily of computer server and storage products. Our products are built on industry standards and are engineered to work together or independently within existing customer information technology (IT), including private and public cloud computing, environments. We offer customers secure, reliable, and scalable integrated software and hardware solutions that are designed to improve business efficiencies and more easily adapt to an organization’s unique needs, at a lower total cost of ownership. We seek to be an industry leader in each of the specific product categories in which we compete and to expand into new and emerging markets.

We believe our internal growth and continued innovation with respect to our software, hardware and services businesses are the foundation of our long-term strategic plans. An important element of our continued innovation and product strategy is 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. Our Oracle Exadata Database Machine and Oracle Exalogic Elastic Cloud products exemplify this strategy and are currently two of our most important products. Both products combine certain of our hardware and software offerings to provide an engineered system that increases computing performance relative to our competitors’ products, creating time savings and operational cost advantages for our customers. In fiscal 2011, 2010 and 2009 we invested $4.5 billion, $3.3 billion and $2.8 billion, respectively, in research and development to enhance our existing portfolio of products and services and to develop new products and services.

We also believe that an active acquisition program is an important element of our corporate strategy as it strengthens our competitive position, enhances the products and services that we can offer to customers, expands our customer base, provides greater scale to accelerate innovation, grows our 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