Oracle becomes unlikely port of calm in stormy economic waters

Those challenges are real. Nevertheless the company has been so successful that observers are giving it the benefit of the doubt when it comes to tackling rivals or shifts in research.

Intel is surrounded by doubts about its future in the post-PC world, as it struggles to sell chips for mobile phones and tablets. Apple is going gangbusters, however it just lost its iconic leader. In the same fashion, Google is however strong yet faces questions about whether the rise of social networking rival Facebook will crimp its growth and how it will fare in accordance with its new CEO.

The move to cloud computing

Critics as well say Oracle lags in the move to cloud computing, mobile computing and handling the explosion of so-called "unstructured data," stuff like tweets, emails and voices messages that don't neatly fit into the rows and columns of a traditional database.