of many of our Oracle Engineered Systems including Oracle Exadata Database Machine, Oracle Exalogic Elastic Cloud, Oracle Exalytics In-Memory Machine and the Oracle Big Data Appliance.

Our storage products are designed to securely manage, protect, archive and restore customers’ mission critical data assets and consist of tape, disk, flash and hardware-related software including file systems software, back-up and archive software and storage management software and networking for mainframe and open systems environments.

Our networking and data center fabric products, including Oracle Virtual Networking, and Oracle InfiniBand and Ethernet technologies, are used with our server and storage products and are integrated into our management tools to help enterprise customers improve infrastructure performance, reduce cost and complexity and simplify storage and server connectivity. We also offer hardware and software products and services for communications networks including network signaling, policy control and subscriber data management solutions, and session border control technology, amongst others.

The majority of our hardware systems products are sold through indirect channels, including independent distributors and value added resellers.

To produce our hardware products, we rely on both our internal manufacturing operations as well as third party manufacturing partners. Our internal manufacturing operations consist primarily of materials procurement, assembly, testing and quality control of our Oracle Engineered Systems and certain of our enterprise and data center servers and storage systems. For all other manufacturing, we generally rely on third party manufacturing partners to produce our hardware related components and hardware products and we may involve our internal manufacturing operations in the final assembly, testing and quality control processes for these components and products. We distribute most of our hardware products either from our facilities or partner facilities. We strive to reduce costs by simplifying our manufacturing processes through increased standardization of components across product types and a “build-to-order” manufacturing process in which products generally are built only after customers have placed firm orders.

Our hardware systems products revenues, cost of hardware systems products and hardware systems operating margins that we report are affected by our strategy for and the competitive position of our hardware systems products, the strength of general economic and business conditions, governmental budgetary constraints, certain of our acquisitions and foreign currency rate fluctuations. In addition, our operating margins for our hardware systems products segment have been and will be affected by the amortization of intangible assets.

Our quarterly hardware systems products revenues are difficult to predict. The timing of customer orders and delays in our ability to timely manufacture or deliver a few large hardware transactions could substantially affect the amount of hardware systems products revenues, expenses and operating margins that we report.

Hardware Systems Support:     Our hardware