Oracle Corp seems to have brought a lot of the obloquy that followed its disappointing third quarter figures on itself: turns out the reason for the shortfall was that one or more US government contracts on which its Federal group was working were temporarily out of funds, so that while the work had been done, the company had to wait for the budget to come through to be paid; the reason that it wasn’t aware of this hole in the third quarter figures until five days before it made the announcement was that there was a glitch in its accounting system – all of which suggests that while internal communications could clearly be better, there may truly be no reason to assume that the company’s markets are beginning to turn down on it.
