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 and provide subscription-based access to select Oracle software applications and software platforms through a cloud-based IT environment to businesses of many sizes, government agencies, educational institutions and resellers. 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 27%, 26% and 28% of our total revenues in fiscal 2012, 2011 and 2010, respectively. The proportion of our new software license revenues relative to our total revenues was affected by our entry into the hardware systems business as a result of our acquisition of Sun in the third quarter of fiscal 2010. 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 segment’s margins have been and will continue to be affected by fair value adjustments relating to the cloud software subscription obligations that we assumed in business combinations (described further below) and by the amortization of intangible assets associated with companies and technologies that we have acquired.

We recorded adjustments to reduce obligations under our assumed cloud software subscription offerings in business combinations to their estimated fair values at the acquisition dates. As a result, as required by business combination accounting rules, we did not recognize cloud software subscription revenues as a part of our new software licenses revenues that would have been otherwise recorded as revenues by the acquired businesses as independent entities in the amount of $22 million in fiscal 2012. To the extent underlying cloud software subscription contracts are renewed with us following