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KPMG is targeting the 350 biggest businesses by working with Oracle to provide services through the software giant’s cloud offering.

Through what is known as KPMG Powered Finance, the accountancy firm will use Oracle Cloud to deliver its expertise, financial processing, analytics and reporting to customers.

The collaboration will begin by offering core finance processes in the Oracle Cloud.

The service can be used by businesses to transform finance functions, as well as for collating data and sorting it in the cloud. The collaboration will also enable KPMG's clients to benchmark against high-performing businesses in their own sector.

KPMG said businesses need to be able to change their tax and finance systems as they grow, and while traditional software contracts make this difficult, the cloud offers a solution.

“Far too often we hear stories about fast-growing firms being constrained by their financial capability, or because the software they bought into during their embryonic years is no longer able to support their needs,” said Patrick Fenton, head of financial management at KPMG. 

“This demonstrates our commitment to technology-driven change, with the crucial recognition that cloud-based tools and programs give organisations the freedom they need to adapt and grow,” he added.

In its most recent financial results, Oracle’s overall cloud services business – for the latest three-month period – grew by more than 30% to $475m in sales. Total cloud services revenue amounted to 5.5% of total takings, compared with 3% of sales for the previous quarter.

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Oracle’s Larry Ellison has resigned as chief executive after 35 years at the helm of the company he co-founded in 1977 with Bob Miner and Ed Oates.

But Ellison will remain as executive chairman and chief technology officer. Jeff Henley, who has served as Oracle's chairman for the past 10 years, will become Oracle's vice chairman.

Under his leadership, the company has become the world’s largest database supplier and one of the biggest enterprise software businesses, currently valued at $182.7bn.

Oracle co-presidents Safra Catz and Mark Hurd are to become joint CEOs to replace Ellison.

Catz will remain chief financial officer and oversee legal and manufacturing operations, while Hurd will run sales, marketing and strategy.

Ellison, whose fortune is estimated at $51.4bn, remains Oracle’s largest shareholder, holding 1.1bn shares, or 25%, of the company.

Catz has been instrumental in many of Oracle’s biggest acquisitions including its $10.3bn takeover of PeopleSoft and the $7.4bn deal for Sun Microsystems.

Hurd joined Oracle as president in 2010 when he left Hewlett-Packard after an internal investigation revealed that irregularities in his expenses claims were used to cover up a “close personal relationship”.

At the time, Ellison came out in strong support for Hurd, criticising the HP board for forcing him to quit. In the four years that Hurd was HP CEO, the company’s shares doubled in value.

“Safra and Mark will now report to the Oracle board rather than to me. All other reporting  relationships will remain unchanged,” Ellison said in a statement.

“The three of us have been working well together for the last several years, and we plan to continue working together for the foreseeable future. Keeping this management team in place has always been a top priority of mine,” he said.

Oracle board president Michael Boskin said: "Larry has made it very clear that he wants to keep working full time and focus his energy on product engineering, technology development and strategy."

The charismatic Ellison has also used his Oracle wealth to branch outside the IT world. His yachting team won the America's Cup in a dramatic finish in 2013, and he made a cameo appearance in the super-hero movie Iron Man 2. 

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Oracle’s fourth-quarter 2014 results show 25% growth in cloud revenues to $322m and total annual revenue of $38.3bn, up 3% year-on-year.

The supplier reported its cloud revenue separately for the first time. It represents 3% of sales.

Larry Ellison (pictured), Oracle’s CEO, talked up the company’s cloud revenue in a statement. “Oracle is now the second largest SaaS [software as a service] company in the world [behind Salesforce],” he said. “In IaaS [infrastructure as a service], we are larger and more profitable than Rackspace. We have by far the most complete portfolio of modern SaaS and PaaS [platform as a service] products in the industry: CRM: sales, service and marketing; HCM: HR, payroll and talent; ERP: accounting, procurement, supply chain. All these SaaS products run on the world’s most powerful PaaS: the Oracle in-memory multi-tenant database and Java.”

For the quarter, software and cloud revenues were up 4% to $8.9bn. GAAP (generally accepted accounting principles) cloud SaaS and PaaS revenues were up 25% to $322m, while non-GAAP SaaS and PaaS revenues were up 23% to $327m. Cloud IaaS revenues were up 13% to $128m.

New software licence revenues were unchanged at $3.8bn, while software licence updates and product support revenues were up 7% to $4.7bn.

Hardware systems revenues were up 2% to $1.5bn with hardware systems products up 2% to $870m and hardware systems support up 2% to $596m.

However, GAAP net income was down 4% to $3.6bn, and GAAP operating profit was down 2% to $4.9bn.

For the entire 2014 fiscal year, total revenues were up 3% at $38.3bn, while GAAP software and cloud revenues were up 5%. Cloud SaaS and PaaS revenues were up 23% to $1.1bn while cloud IaaS revenues were up $456m.

For the year, new software licence revenues were unchanged at $9.4bn, while software licence updates and product support revenues were up 6% to $18.2bn.

Total hardware system revenues were flat at $5.4bn.

GAAP operating income was up 1% to $14.8bn, and GAAP operating margin was 39%.

Oracle president and CFO Safra Catz said a transition to an ‘as a service’ model is necessarily softening software sales in the short run. “Our cloud subscription business is now approaching a run rate of $2bn a year,” she said. “As our business has transitioned, more software revenues are being recognised over the life of a subscription, rather than upfront.”

On the hardware front, Oracle president Mark Hurd said: “We have transformed Sun’s commodity hardware business into a profitable and growing engineered systems business. Our overall hardware business grew 2% in constant currency this year.”

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Oracle is expected to acquire internet-enabled point-of sale-specialist Micros.

The $5bn acquisition is set to be Oracle's largest since its decade-long spending spree brought in Siebel, PeopleSoft and BEA.

Oracle's last major retail software acquisition was Retek in 2005.

The addition of Micros is set to boost the company's retail platform and increase Oracle's influence in the food, leisure and hospitality markets.

Oracle is an existing technology partner of Micros, which uses the Oracle stack and Oracle's Real Application Cluster technology to support scalability.

The challenge for Oracle is that Micros is a Microsoft Gold Partner and HP partner. The company's Simphony 2.0 hospitality management is built on Microsoft .Net Framework 3.5, Windows Presentation Foundation, and uses SQL Server 2008 Enterprise and Windows Embedded CE 6.0 R3 operating system.

Micros also has a technology partnership with HP. The company's website says: "The partnership has built a new, incremental business for both companies, currently worth approximately €10m annually to HP Ireland."

Micros' customers include Pizza Hut in the UK, Wagamama, TGI Friday, Aston Villa FC, the Ricoh Arena in Coventry and Marriott International in North America.

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