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"Oracle is slated to report earnings for its fiscal third quarter of 2016 on Tuesday, and analysts aren\u2019t expecting much.\nAmid changing customer purchasing habits and the rise of cloud computing, the business technology giant\u2014along with other legacy enterprise companies like IBM \n\t\t\t\t\n\t\t\t\t\t\n\t\t\t\t\t\tibm\n\t\t\t\t\t\t\n\t\t\t\t\t\n\t\t\t\t\n\t\t\t and Hewlett Packard Enterprise \n\t\t\t\t\n\t\t\t\t\t\n\t\t\t\t\t\thpe\n\t\t\t\t\t\t\n\t\t\t\t\t\n\t\t\t\t\n\t\t\t\u2014has seen its sales slump in recent years. Analysts expect that trend to continue when Oracle \n\t\t\t\t\n\t\t\t\t\t\n\t\t\t\t\t\torcl\n\t\t\t\t\t\t\n\t\t\t\t\t\n\t\t\t\t\n\t\t\t gives its investors an update on its financials.\nOracle is expected to report earnings of 62 cents per share on $9.13 billion in revenue, according to analyst estimates. This a bit of a drop from the 68 cents per share on $9.3 billion in sales that the company reported last year during its third quarter.\nOracle derives the bulk of its sales on its database technology, but as Fortune reported in December, that business unit has seen its sales flatten year over year.\nGet Data Sheet, Fortune\u2019s technology newsletter.\nTo compensate, the company has been busy building up its cloud computing business unit, which the company said earned $652 million during its second quarter, representing a 30% year-over-year increase.\nOn Monday, JMP Securities issued a research report on Oracle\u2019s upcoming earnings and noted that although Oracle\u2019s cloud business is seeing progress, its overall business still facing significant challenges from the big cloud-computing providers like Amazon \n\t\t\t\t\n\t\t\t\t\t\n\t\t\t\t\t\tamzn\n\t\t\t\t\t\t\n\t\t\t\t\t\n\t\t\t\t\n\t\t\t and Microsoft \n\t\t\t\t\n\t\t\t\t\t\n\t\t\t\t\t\tmsft\n\t\t\t\t\t\t\n\t\t\t\t\t\n\t\t\t\t\n\t\t\t.\nFrom the JMP Securities report:\nStepping back, we believe Oracle&amp;#8217;s problem is this: while it is seeing strong growth in its SaaS cloud applications, demand is shifting away from its database, middleware, and hardware businesses as enterprises move workloads out of corporate data centers and into cloud infrastructure vendors like Amazon Web Services (AWS) and Microsoft Azure.\nThe JMP Securities research report echoes a recent analyst report issued last week from the financial firm Nomura. Nomura analyst Frederick Grieb wrote, \u201CWhile metrics for cloud revenue growth have been solid, investors remain concerned by what the potential cost will be to the legacy business, as well as the potential impact to margins during the transition.\u201D\nFor more on Oracle, check out this Fortune video:\n\n\t\t\t\t\n\t\t\t\n\t\t\t\nStill, not everyone is down on Oracle.\nAccording to a Monday report in TheStreet, Evercore Partners analyst Kirk Materne recently upgraded the company to \u201Cbuy.\u201D Unlike the other analysts, he believes that Oracle\u2019s cloud business will grow quickly enough to \u201Cmore than offset any weakness in the company&amp;#8217;s legacy software license business when projecting out to fiscal 2017,\u201D said the report."^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
<http://fortune.com/2016/03/14/analyst-oracle-earnings/>