Enterprise software giant Oracle (ORCL 0.22%) reports fiscal second-quarter earnings on Wednesday. The Street is hoping for $9.2 billion in revenue and $0.67 per share in adjusted earnings. Compare that bottom line forecast with Oracle's own guidance of $0.64-$0.69 per share in adjusted profit. Last quarter, Oracle posted disappointing hardware sales of $669 million, a trend that the company expects to continue. Oracle's outlook calls for hardware revenue growth in the range of negative 9% to positive 1%. Growth in software license and cloud subscription revenues are also expected in the range of negative 4% to positive 6%.
Oracle remains a market leader in enterprise software, and its shares remain cheap at 15 times earnings and four times sales. However, global information technology spending is expected to see growth decelerate in 2014. On the flip side, founder and CEO Larry Ellison's excessive compensation has come under fire recently. Here at The Fool, we love founder CEOs since they provide the long-term vision to the companies they start, but we also tend to look down on excessive compensation as a blow to corporate governance.
In this segment of Tech Teardown, Erin Kennedy discusses Oracle's coming earnings with Evan Niu, CFA, our tech and telecom bureau chief.
