general economic conditions, personnel reductions in our customers’ IT departments, tighter controls over discretionary spending and the growth in our software and hardware systems products revenues.

Our consulting line of business primarily provides services to customers in business and IT strategy alignment, enterprise architecture planning and design, initial product implementation and integration and ongoing product enhancements and upgrades. The amount of consulting revenues recognized tends to lag the amount of our software and hardware systems products revenues by several quarters since consulting services, if purchased, are typically segmentable from the products with which they relate and are performed after the customer’s purchase of the products. Our services revenues as they relate to consulting services are dependent upon general economic conditions and the level of our product revenues, in particular the new software license sales of our application products. To the extent we are able to grow our products revenues, in particular our software application product revenues, we would also generally expect to be able to eventually grow our consulting revenues.

Oracle managed cloud services provide comprehensive software and hardware management and maintenance services—including deployment, management, monitoring, patching, security and upgrade services—for customers hosted at our Oracle data center facilities, select partner data centers, or physically on-premise at customer facilities. Additionally, we provide support services, both on-premise and remote, to Oracle customers to enable increased performance and higher availability of their products and services. We believe that our managed cloud services offerings provide our customers with greater value and choice through increased business performance, reduced risk, a predictable cost and more flexibility in terms of service in order to maximize the performance of their Oracle software and hardware products and services.

Education services provide training to customers, partners and employees as a part of our mission to further the adoption and usage of our software and hardware products by our customers and create opportunities to grow our products revenues.

Acquisitions

An active acquisition program is another important element of our corporate strategy. In recent years, we have invested billions of dollars to acquire a number of complementary companies, products, services and technologies including Taleo Corporation (Taleo) and RightNow Technologies, Inc (RightNow) in fiscal 2012, and Art Technology Group, Inc. (ATG) and Phase Forward Incorporated (Phase Forward) in fiscal 2011, among others. We believe our acquisition program strengthens our competitive position, enhances the products and services that we can offer to customers, expands our customer base, provides greater scale to accelerate innovation, grows our revenues and earnings and increases stockholder value. We expect to continue to acquire companies, products, services and technologies in furtherance of our corporate strategy. Note 2 of Notes to Consolidated Financial Statements included elsewhere in this Annual