of currency rate fluctuations, total hardware systems support margin and margin as a percentage of total revenues increased in fiscal 2013 due to the reduction in our total hardware systems support expenses.

Fiscal 2012 Compared to Fiscal 2011:     Excluding the effect of currency rate fluctuations, hardware systems support revenues decreased in fiscal 2012 for similar reasons as those noted above for our fiscal 2013 revenues decreases. Regionally, revenue decreases in the EMEA and Asia Pacific regions were partially offset by higher revenues in the Americas. As described above, the amounts of hardware systems support revenues that we recognized in fiscal 2012 and fiscal 2011 were affected by business combination accounting rules.

Excluding the effect of currency rate fluctuations, total hardware systems support expenses decreased in fiscal 2012 primarily due to the reduction of service delivery costs during fiscal 2012 resulting from our integration initiatives associated with our acquisition of Sun.

Excluding the effect of currency rate fluctuations, total hardware systems support margin and margin as a percentage of total revenues increased in fiscal 2012 as a result of our expense reductions for this segment.

Services Business

Our services business consists of consulting, managed cloud services and education services. Consulting revenues are earned by providing services to customers in business and IT strategy alignment, enterprise architecture planning and design, initial product implementation and integration, and ongoing product enhancements and upgrades. Managed cloud services revenues are earned by providing comprehensive software and hardware management and maintenance services—including deployment, management, monitoring, patching, security and upgrade services—for customers hosted at our Oracle data center facilities, select partner data centers or physically on-premise at customer facilities. Additionally, we provide support services, both on-premise and remote, to our customers to enable increased performance and higher availability of their products and services. Education revenues are earned by providing instructor-led, media-based, internet-based and custom training in the use of our software and hardware products. The cost of providing our services consists primarily of personnel related expenses, technology infrastructure expenditures, facilities expenses and external contractor expenses.

Fiscal 2013 Compared to Fiscal 2012:     Excluding the effect of currency rate fluctuations, our total services revenues decreased in fiscal 2013 due to revenue decreases in each of our services segments. The largest services revenues decrease in fiscal 2013 was to our consulting segment’s revenues, which were primarily impacted by weaker demand in EMEA due to weaker economic conditions and which also experienced higher revenues in the Asia Pacific region.

Excluding the effect of currency rate fluctuations, total services expenses decreased during fiscal 2013 primarily due to expense decreases across all of our services segments, which consisted primarily of decreases in external contractor costs, lower variable compensation