Oracle Reports Earnings Today. Here’s What to Expect.

Oracle shares have been on a roll in 2021, up 37.5% year to date, as the technology giant increases its focus on offering cloud-based versions of its enterprise software. The market will get a progress report on Oracle’s journey to the cloud after the close of trading on Thursday, when it reports financial results for its fiscal second quarter ended Nov. 30.

For the quarter, Oracle (ticker: ORCL) has projected revenue growth in the 3% to 5% range, which at the midpoint implies $10.2 billion, which happens to be the Wall Street analyst consensus. The company is forecasting non-GAAP profits of $1.09 to $1.13 a share, with the Street consensus splitting the difference at $1.11 a share.

For the February quarter, the Street consensus calls for revenue of $10.5 billion, up 4.7% from a year earlier, with non-GAAP profits of $1.16 a share.

As Barron’s highlighted in a magazine cover story earlier this year, Oracle is making a multipronged bet on the cloud, shifting customers to cloud-based versions of both its database software and enterprise applications, while also expanding Oracle Cloud Infrastructure, or OCI, which is trying to compete with the likes of Amazon.com ‘s (AMZN) Amazon Web Services and Microsoft‘s (MSFT) Azure in the market for cloud services. Investors will be looking for signs of progress on that bet.

In a research note previewing the quarter, Cowen software analyst J. Derrick Wood writes that he expects results to be in line with Street estimates, and that checks with the company’s marketing partners were stronger than they were one quarter earlier. Wood says that OCI was the product seeing the biggest uptick in demand, with strength as well in Cloud@Customer, Oracle’s private cloud service, and in Autonomous Database, the cloud-based version of the company’s flagship software.

Wood maintains his Outperform rating on Oracle shares, asserting that the stock can “continue to grind higher,” though he worries that in the near term, currency headwinds could be an issue for reported results.

BMO Capital Markets analyst Keith Bachman is more cautious on Oracle shares. He thinks the company can average 5% growth over the next seven quarters, and he remains bullish on the company’s enterprise resource planning software business, which competes with SAP (SAP). But he is more cautious about the outlook for the database business, where he says the company has been losing market share.

On Wednesday, Oracle shares slipped 1.2%, to $88.94. The S&P 500 closed up 0.3%.