Mastering the art of data: the skills that will get you noticed

It’s almost a decade since a much-shared Harvard Business Review article declared data scientist the sexiest job of the 21st century. But is working with data still as novel or as exciting as it was then?

The rise of digital currencies in the emerging world

As of September 7, 2021, El Salvador will officially recognise Bitcoin as legal currency. This is a remarkable move, and one that will likely stimulate a huge amount of economic growth as Salvadoreans leapfrog from a largely cash-based society straight to a system characterised by the frictionless, finger-snap efficiency of digital currency.

Trump’s plans to ban Chinese app WeChat blocked

A federal judge has temporarily blocked President Donald Trump’s executive order to ban WeChat over concerns the ban would threaten users’ first amendment rights

Why the biggest tech companies are investing in India’s Jio

An incredible windfall of investment from the likes of Facebook and Google has put Jio, an Indian telecoms company, in the spotlight

Oracle returns to growth

The software maker’s quarterly revenue exceeded analysts’ expectations, as remote working drove greater demand for its cloud-computing services

On 10 September, Oracle reported quarterly revenue that was better than analysts had expected, sending shares up by as much as 6 percent in the same day. The company has seen increased demand for its cloud-computing services during the pandemic, as businesses around the world shifted to remote working.

Fiscal first-quarter sales rose 1.6 percent to $9.37bn, beating analysts’ average estimate of $9.19bn, according to Refinitiv. In the previous three-month period, Oracle’s revenue had fallen 6 percent year-over-year.

The results show that Oracle’s cloud services and license support segment drive the majority of revenue. Sales in this segment increased 2 percent to $6.95bn. At the same time, cloud license and on-premise license sales rose 9 percent to $886m, which suggests that the company is signing more new software deals.

Recently, Oracle has been in the headlines for trying to acquire the US assets of TikTok. Owning the video-sharing app would give Oracle an edge over its rivals and would also provide it with large amount of consumer data that it could sell to advertisers for its ad-targeting business, Oracle Data Cloud.

In recent years, Oracle has signed a number of successful partnerships, including a cloud interoperability partnership with Microsoft, which was announced in 2019. Oracle also acquired the computer programming language Java and the open-source database MySQL through its purchase of Sun Microsystems in 2010.

Founded in 1977 by Larry Ellison, Bob Miner and Ed Oates, Oracle became the largest database management company in the world during the 1980s thanks to the popularity of its eponymous database software. Even as competition in the sector has increased, Oracle has remained a leader in database technology.