On June 16, Oracle Corporation released financial results for the fourth quarter of fiscal year 2016, and corporate executives trumpeted the company's cloud services success. According to the latest report, Oracle's cloud infrastructure, platform, and software services collectively brought in $859 million for the quarter ending May 31, compared to $576 million for the same period in 2015. Oracle brought in $2.853 billion in revenues for cloud and had an $8.9 billion (£6.07 billion) profit for the year.

But those numbers don't tell the whole story. Oracle's overall revenue was down, largely because of its shrinking "on premises" software sales, which fell by $224 million versus 4Q FY2015 and by $1.245 billion (£0.85 billion) for the year as a whole. Software license and software maintenance sales still account for 73 percent of Oracle's revenue, while cloud accounts for only 5 percent. Oracle's hardware revenues, which still account for 14 percent of its overall income, fell by 9 percent during the quarter and 10 percent for the full year.

There's some controversy over Oracle's reported cloud sales numbers, however. On June 1, former Oracle senior finance manager Svetlana Blackburn filed suit against Oracle for wrongful termination in October of 2015, claiming that she was fired after she "resisted, refused to engage in, and threatened to blow the whistle on accounting practices she reasonably believed to be unlawful" surrounding how Oracle counted cloud revenues. In a statement to the press, an Oracle spokesperson denied that there was any wrongdoing.

So how did Oracle increase profit on revenue that shrank overall by about 1 percent? The company slashed the operating cost of performing software updates, license support, developing and supporting new hardware, and services—in other words, through layoffs, consolidation, and redirection of efforts from areas that had been Oracle's core business. That effort has included essentially stopping development work on anything that is not directly tied to revenue generation, including moving the next iteration of the enterprise Java platform forward, as a number of deadlines for milestones in the release of Java Enterprise Edition (Java EE) 8 have been blown.

According to data gleaned from the Java Community Process (JCP) by Java community members associated with Java EE Guardians—a Java EE advocacy group that includes Java's principal creator, Dr. James Gosling—progress on Java EE 8 virtually halted following the JavaOne conference in October 2015. (Java EE 8 is the next iteration of the server-side Java components used in many enterprise software platforms.) Some Oracle enterprise customers have complained that there have been long delays in addressing bugs, including security flaws, in other software products.

Aside from its legal battle with Google over Android's use of Java APIs ,Oracle's commitment to the Java platform has been in question for some time. In November of 2013, Oracle halted support for business users of the Glassfish Java Enterprise Edition server platform. And while the "Open" edition was still under development up until October of 2015 and was intended to be the basis of Java EE 8, Oracle announced in April that the Java.net repository site where Glassfish and other open Java projects have resided will be shuttered by next April. And Oracle not indicated if there would be future direct support from Oracle for development of the platform. Meanwhile, development of Java SE, the desktop Java runtime, has continued at life-support levels.