Database and enterprise solutions giant Oracle will be holding its earnings call on March 20, tomorrow, and the company’s under pressure to show some improvement over the poor results it reported last quarter.  Back then the company missed the consensus estimate by 2 cents with a net income of only 52 per share.

Analysts expect Oracle to report net income of 54 cents per share, down 3 percent from the average forecast three months ago, on sales of $9.02 billion.

A lot is at stake. Oracle has been ignoring some of the key trends in IT – cloud, and big data – for too long, while competitors such as IBM and SAP have been doing the exact opposite. Now Oracle has some serious catching up to do. The previous quarter outlined some of the poor decisions the company took, but we may see things changing in the near term, thanks to new initiatives that address both of these areas.

These projects include a partnership with Cloudera, and an in-memory analytics appliance called Exadata which competes directly with SAP’s HANA platform. The offering’s fast growth is being felt by Oracle, and the latest push does so rather ironically.

Amidst Oracle’s efforts to deliver some solid numbers to its investors, SAP announced the new HANA-based Finance and Controlling Accelerator software. The solution offers companies a better means of aggregating and handling their financial data.

“SAP Finance and Controlling Accelerator supports finance organizations with faster access to vast amounts of ledger, cost and material ledger data as well as easy exploration of trusted and detailed data. It offers four implementation scenarios – financial accounting, controlling, material ledger and production cost analysis. Each can be implemented individually or in any combination. “