Oracle Corp (NYSE:ORCL) stock rose 0.58% (As on October 10, 11:25:38 AM UTC-4, Source: Google Finance) after Evercore ISI analysts upgraded shares of the company to Outperform from In Line with a price target of $135 per share. The analysts believe that the recent pullback (-13% since F1Q) simply creates a more interesting entry point for a business that is now in a better position to deliver more consistent revenue and earnings growth due a higher % of revenue coming from its cloud solutions. The apps and infrastructure cloud businesses have reached a sizeable portion of revenue, which is expected to drive total revenue growth in the high single digits in the future, the analysts also noted.
Oracle Cloud Infrastructure (OCI) represents a potential long-term growth opportunity, with estimated growth rates (50% CAGR from FY23-26) that could prove conservative. The macroeconomic environment is favorable to integrated software suites, which should support steady growth in Oracle’s applications segment and potentially drive database/OCI revenue as legacy customers transition to the cloud.
Analysts also flag that current estimates for FY26 provide room for upside relative to Oracle’s guidance, indicating potential for strong performance. The current valuation leaves room for upside if Oracle can show consistent revenue growth and margin expansion, as per the analysts.
On the other hand, the company has introduced a standard for network and data security that can help organisations protect their data in distributed IT environments. Under this new initiative, Oracle is expected to collaborate with Applied Invention, Nomura Research Institute, Ltd. (NRI), a consulting services and system solution, among others.
The new standard is believed to enable networks to include shared security policies, improving the security architecture organisations already use without changing existing applications and networks. To support this new initiative, Oracle plans to release the Oracle Zero-Trust Packet Routing Platform. This platform is believed to be based on the new standard that can help organisations prevent unauthorised access or use of their data.
It is believed the new standard will use an intent-based security policy that humans can read, audit, and understand. This intent might be used at the network layer, with all traffic containing authenticated attributes about the sender, receiver, and type of data in motion.
Meanwhile, Oracle Corp and Microsoft Corp have recently announced Oracle Database@Azure, which gives customers direct access to Oracle database services running on Oracle Cloud Infrastructure (OCI) and deployed in Microsoft Azure datacenters.