Oracle rises as Barclays upgrades, citing 'multi-year growth story'
Justin Sullivan
Oracle (NYSE:ORCL) shares rose more than 1.5% in pre-market trading on Tuesday as investment firm Barclays upgraded the IT giant, citing a "multi-year growth story."
"We see a multi-year opportunity for solid growth at high margins driven by an ongoing positive mix effect of better [software-as-a-service and Oracle Cloud Infrastructure] outweighing the lower growth parts of the business," Raimo Lenschow wrote in an investor note. "[Oracle Cloud Infrastructure], partly fueled by emerging AI workloads, will be key to the database and overall story." 
Lenschow raised his rating on Oracle (ORCL) to overweight from equal-weight and boosted the price target to $150 from $126.
Lenschow added that the continued shift of Oracle's (ORCL) products - such as Fusion, NetSuite and OCI - into the cloud has helped growth in the past few years and it's expected that this can be maintained, "as the positive mix effect still has a long way to go," as these three businesses still make up less than 25% of total revenue.
Additionally, Lenschow pointed out that OCI should benefit from AI workloads given its "close relationship" with Nvidia (NVDA) and the fact it was one of the first cloud service providers to use Nvidia's software-as-a-service products. 
"As such, we think there is enough for investor interest to continue," Lenschow explained.
Analysts are largely cautious on Oracle (ORCL). It has a HOLD rating from Seeking Alpha authors, while Wall Street analysts rate it a BUY. Conversely, Seeking Alpha's quant system, which consistently beats the market, rates ORCL a HOLD.

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