You look at Oracle, you see a company at nearly a 7-year-high, and you wonder whether the company was over-bought, and whether investors were getting a little ahead of themselves.
Nope.
Not only did Oracle
|
||
[ORCL 22.55 
0.32 (+1.44%) 
] beat the Street by 3 cents, reporting 47 cents instead of the 44 cents analysts expected, but the company soared past revenue consensus as well: $7.2 billion against the $6.86 billion expected. But you have to deeper into the spreadsheet to see just how good these numbers truly are.
New software sales, a key metric, jumped to $3.14 billion, versus the $2.48 billion a year ago, and the $2.91 billion the Street was looking for. In fact, software licenses jumped 27 percent year over year when Oracle’s own guidance suggested a range of between 10 percent and 20 percent. Middleware and database licenses increased 24 percent and new applications licenses rose a whopping 38 percent.
|
related content |
And check out the company’s operating margin. The company reports 48 percent on the quarter; 43 percent for its full fiscal year. These are better margins than Microsoft has.
“The results look very clean, very encouraging. They show a nice improvement and recovery in the applications side of the business (from the March quarter),” says Pacific Crest’s Brendan Barnicle. “It is Oracle’s fourth quarter. I always caution investors about reading too much into that. Oracle can pull through a lot of business in the quarter…Customers recognize they can get the best discounts of the year in this period.”
I’m sorry, but aren’t we supposed to be in a recession, or heading toward one? The company’s performance inside and outside the United States was exceptional, and it is seeing no softness in the United States. In fact, its revenue in the Americas increased to $3.018 billion, or about $700 million more than in the prior quarter.
It’s a huge quarter, any which way you look at it. Just what Larry Ellison needed.
“Nobody expected the May quarter to come in as strong as it did,” says David Garrity of Dinosaur Research. Larry is just going to have to buy a bigger boat.”
Keep this up, and a lot of Oracle investors may be in the market for his hand-me-downs.
Google is expected to introduce a new ad-planning tool for agencies and marketers at an industry conference on Tuesday.
Word that the Internet search giant has something up its sleeve surfaced when the Advertising Research Foundation, which is holding a media conference focused on audience measurement in New York starting Tuesday, publicized a Google presentation scheduled for 5 p.m. on Tuesday.
“Wayne Lin, Google Business Product Manager, will introduce Google’s latest initiative in internet audience measurement,” the ARF said on its Web site. That page was taken down at Google’s request. “They asked us not to reveal any details,” said Joel Rubinson, chief research officer at the ARF. Oops. (Incidentally, thanks to Google’s cache, the page can be found here.
Google declined to comment.
A person familiar with Google’s plans, who spoke on condition of anonymity because he was not authorized to discuss the product before Google makes it public, said that the new tool, called AdPlanner, was designed to help agencies identify sites where their target audience might be active. While it uses audience measurement data, AdPlanner also combines it with search engine data and information from third parties, to determine with more precision what sites attract a certain demographic audience. It then uses that data to help agencies determine where to place ads.
If a media buyer has been successful with ads that ran on WebMD, for example, AdPlanner might be able to easily identify other sites where that media buyer will find similar success because they attract a similar audience, the person said. AdPlanner is expected to be offered for free, at least initially.
Other companies, including comScore, Nielsen Online and Quantcast, offer a variety of audience measurement and media planning tools, including some that help buyers identify more precisely the demographic audiences of Web sites.
On Friday, Google introduced Google Trends for Web sites, which allows anyone to measure a Web site’s audience. Google said that the service calculates a site’s audience by using a combination of source “such as aggregated Google search data, aggregated opt-in anonymous Google Analytics data, opt-in consumer panel data, and other third-party market research.”
The person familiar with AdPlanner said there would be “overlap in what it accomplishes,” but added that AdPlanner would be tailored specifically to help media buyers.
By the way, Google Trends for Web sites is great at measuring the audience of all sorts of Web properties, but don’t try to use it to measure Google.com, Orkut, YouTube or any other Google property. The explanation, via a statement from a Google spokesperson: “We do not show Google.com properties on Trends for Web sites. We have policy of not providing interim financial guidance, and have decided not to release Google numbers in accordance with that policy.”
If you’re a media planner at an ad agency, you know that planning an online display buy can be challenging, particularly in scaling your campaign’s reach while keeping it relevant for your target audience. Plus, how do you keep track of the millions of sites out there that might be just right for your campaign?
To make your life easier, we’re introducing Google Ad Planner, a research and media planning tool that connects advertisers and publishers. When using Google Ad Planner, simply enter demographics and sites associated with your target audience, and the tool will return information about sites (both on and off the Google content network) that your audience is likely to visit. You can drill down further to get more detail like demographics and related searches for a particular site, or you can get aggregate statistics for the sites you’ve added to your media plan.
While Google Trends for Websites, announced last week, is designed for all users, Google Ad Planner is designed with media planners in mind. Using Google Ad Planner, you can quickly create media plans and export to a .csv file, which can be opened in most spreadsheet applications. Or, you can export to DoubleClick’s MediaVisor, which helps you manage all your other media planning, buying and campaign management activities.
(Click the image for a full-size version)
We hope you’ll find this tool useful and discover many relevant sites–small and large–that would otherwise be hard to find. As Ad Planner is a new product, it’s currently available by invitation only. If you’re interested in trying it out, you can apply here.
Microsoft testing prototype of Facebook-like social network