s consulting services include business and IT strategy alignment, enterprise architecture planning and design, initial product implementation and integration, and ongoing product enhancements and upgrades. Together, these services are designed to help its customers achieve their business goals. Oracle Consulting engages customers directly and provides specialized expertise to its global systems integrator partners. Managed Cloud Services Oracle managed cloud services provide software and hardware management and maintenance services, including deployment, management, monitoring, patching, security, and upgrade services—for customers hosted at its Oracle data center facilities, select partner data centers, or physically on-premise at customer facilities. Additionally, the company provides support services, both on-premise and remote, to Oracle customers. Education The company provides training to customers, partners and employees as a part of its mission of accelerating the adoption and use of its software and hardware products. Its training is provided through various formats, including instructor-led classes at its education centers, live virtual training, self-paced online training, training via CD-ROM, private events, and custom training. The company’s live virtual class offerings allow students worldwide to receive real-time, interactive training online. In addition, it offers a certification program certifying database administrators, developers, implementers, consultants, and architects. Marketing and Sales The company directly markets and sells its products and services to businesses of various sizes and in various industries, government agencies and educational institutions. The company also markets and sells its products through indirect channels, including independent distributors and value added resellers. Research and Development The company's research and development expenditures were $4.5 billion in the period ended May 31, 2012. Competition The company’s enterprise software and hardware offerings compete directly with offerings from companies, such as Microsoft Corporation, International Business Machines Corporation, Intel, Hewlett-Packard Company, and SAP AG. Significant Events In July 2012, ITC Infotech India Ltd. collaborated with Oracle Corporation to develop the Oracle Airline Data Model. Part of Oracle’s Passenger Data Management solution, the Oracle Airline Data Model is a comprehensive end-to-end data warehousing, business intelligence and analytics solution for the airline industry. Oracle Corporation is working with Infosys Ltd. and Wipro Ltd., to develop Oracle Fusion Co-existence and Migration Solutions. Oracle Fusion Migration Solutions are part of a strategic co-development project and would provide a set of co-existence and migration tools to support customers of Oracle's PeopleSoft. Work is being conducted across Human Capital Management, Financials and Procurement. Both Infosys and Wipro are engaged in the design, build and test phases of the project and have undergone extensive training in the Oracle technical tools and methodologies used to facilitate the migration process. Through participation in the design and development of co-existence and migration tools, solutions, and processes, Infosys and Wipro are creating deep domain expertise and methodologies to help PeopleSoft customers adopt Oracle Fusion Applications. In October 2012, Advanced Micro Devices, Inc. announced its participation in OpenJDK(TM) Project Sumatra in collaboration with Oracle and other members of the OpenJDK community to help bring heterogeneous computing capabilities to Java for server and cloud environments. In March 2013, ASM Technologies Ltd. (ASM) announced that it will work with Oracle Corporation to co-develop Oracle Fusion Value Chain Planning applications. Under this initiative, ASM will work on two separate co-development projects for the next release of Oracle Fusion Value Chain Planning applications. In June 2013, Dell announced a worldwide alliance with Oracle designed to help customers of all sizes realize the strength of the combined solutions of both c