a standards-based, integrated architecture that is designed to help customers reduce the cost and complexity of their IT infrastructure. Our software products are designed to operate on both single server and clustered server configurations for cloud or on-premise IT environments, and to support a choice of operating systems including Oracle Solaris, Oracle Linux, Microsoft Windows and third party UNIX products, among others. Our customers include businesses of many sizes, government agencies, educational institutions and resellers. We market and sell our software products and services to these customers with a sales force positioned to offer the combinations that best fit their needs. We enable customers to evolve and transform to substantially any IT environment at whatever pace is most appropriate for them.

The growth in new software licenses and cloud software subscriptions revenues that we report is affected by the strength of general economic and business conditions, governmental budgetary constraints, the competitive position of our software offerings, our acquisitions and foreign currency fluctuations. The substantial majority of our new software licenses transactions is characterized by long sales cycles and the timing of a few large software license transactions can substantially affect our quarterly new software licenses and cloud software subscriptions revenues. Since our new software licenses and cloud software subscriptions 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 licenses and cloud software subscriptions 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 this business segment. New software licenses and cloud software subscriptions revenues represented 28%, 27% and 26% of our total revenues in fiscal 2013, 2012 and 2011, respectively. Our cloud software subscriptions contracts are generally one to three years in duration and we strive to renew these contracts when they are eligible for renewal. Our new software licenses and cloud software subscriptions segment’s margin has 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 licenses 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 licenses and cloud software subscriptions segment’s margin has been and will continue to be affected by the fair value adjustments relating to the cloud software subscriptions obligations that we assumed in our business combinations (described further below) and by the amortization of intangible assets associated with companies and technologies that we have acquired.

For certain of our acquired businesses, we recorded adjustments to reduce cloud software subscriptions obligations to their estimated fair values at the acquisition dates. As a result, as required by business combination accounting rules, we