It’s not the only one: Several enterprise software and hardware players are falling right along with Oracle. Salesforce.com, whose primary customer relationship management software rivals Oracle’s, has fallen more than $8, or more than 8 percent. Oracle’s primary software rival, SAP, is down by more than $3, or more than 5 percent. IBM has fallen $6.73, or more than 3 percent. Hewlett-Packard is down 50 cents, or nearly 2 percent. Dell is down 40 cents, or more than 2 percent. Microsoft is falling, too, but not as much.

It looks a lot like what Cannaccord Genuity analyst Richard David predicted in a note to clients this morning. Oracle is something of a bellwether for software company and corporate IT stocks in general. A lot of the problems that sapped Oracle’s results this quarter, David wrote, are specific to Oracle. But in the minds of investors it doesn’t matter:

“Much of the miss was company specific, but it won’t matter this morning. Investors are likely to use this miss as a reason to pound software on Wednesday. We believe Oracle’s miss, combined with Red Hat’s heavily punished but modest scuffle on Tuesday, will first hit infrastructure stocks like VMWare, Citrix Sysems and then for good measure high fliers like Salesforce.com. Our view is more nuanced; Oracle missed because some buyers waited for a new hardware upgrade, and on the software front the firm is behind the curve in cloud applications. We expect Oracle to catch up, but it will be through some R&D and a lot of M&A. We would “back up the truck” on Salesforce if traders knock that stock down because cloud software companies are very likely to gain significant market share from non-cloud vendors.”

Davis cut his rating on Oracle to “Hold” from “Buy,” arguing that the shares will “trade sideways for the next two to three quarters.” Even after an expected “dead cat bounce” — a quick price recovery after a significant fall — Oracle will have some work to do. “Oracle will have to rebuild confidence that the firm is not is not headed to Microsoft’s valuation level over the next few years. Therefore, we can no longer rate Oracle a Buy.”

Not everyone was quite so negative. FBR analyst David Hilal, in a note to clients this morning, lowered his estimates on Oracle’s sales and profits for fiscal 2012. He now expects Oracle to report per-share profits of $2.36, down from $2.44, and cut his sales estimate to $37.7 billion from $39 billion. He also lowered his target to $34 from $38. Even so, he’s still bullish generally, albeit with lower expectations. “The macro debate will now focus on whether IT spending is finally coming under pressure due to broader economic concerns,” Hilal wrote. “While IT spending is not immune to such macro factors, we are not forecasting a material slowdown as we believe enterprises have already been cautious regarding their spending. However, some modest pullback should be expected, particularly post a seasonally strong end to the year.”

BMO Capital analyst Karl Keirstead didn’t agree with Hilal on that point. “Given some weak recent data points from Red Hat, Salesforce.com, Intel and Accenture, we conclude that the macro IT spending backdrop in fact weakened and that the miss was not related to Oracle execution or share losses,” he wrote in a note to clients this morning. “We assumed that Oracle could manage through this tightness and we were obviously wrong.” He lowered his price target to $32 from $38 but maintained a “buy” rating.

Other analysts downgraded Oracle, too. Societé Generale analyst Richard Nguyen cut it to “Hold” from “Buy.” CLSA slashed Oracle shares to “underperform” from “buy,” and lowered its price target to $30 from $36. Deutsche Bank analyst Thomas Ernst lowered his target price to $29 from $33. It’s just one of those days.

Now that there’s a new boss at HP — one who’s staffing up — I’m adding a new image: A paratrooper. After all, despite the fact that HP’s new CEO Meg Whitman is getting things at HP calmed down, there’s still some more drama to come. Anyone taking a new executive job is — by a stretch of phrase — “parachuting in.” Get it? And the parachute picture won’t apply just to HP, either — it also works for posts about other companies that are working through their own dramas. (Cisco Systems, I’m looking at you!)

Anyhow, the paratrooper image also works when you hear where the new guy comes from: Boeing. HP named John Hinshaw, the former vice president and general manager of Boeing Information Solutions, as its new executive vice president of Global Technology and Business Processes.

Hinshaw — who is, by my count, Whitman’s first senior hire since taking over as CEO last month — is 41, and will oversee HP’s information technology and administrative services. He’ll be in charge of procuring service and making sure all the business processes are running as smoothly and efficiently as they should be. It’s a big job, and as such, Hinshaw will be a member of HP’s executive council and report directly to Whitman.

In his previous position, Hinshaw was responsible for running Boeing’s high-growth businesses, which included delivering IT solutions to the U.S. government. Before that, he was Boeing’s CIO responsible for global IT strategy, operations, process and people. Before that, he was senior vice president and CIO at Verizon Wireless. And before that, he was a consultant at Accenture.

In the same announcement, HP also said that Craig Flower has been promoted to senior vice president and CIO. He’s been with HP since 1984 (so no paratrooper for him), and will report to Hinshaw. He’ll oversee data management, applications, global business intelligence and a bunch of other stuff. He’s held a wide range of IT positions within HP, including its e-business operations, customer and sales groups, and the all-important Personal Systems Group. If there’s a guy who knows what’s what at HP, it seems Flower would be it.

Update: As the commenter below just reminded me, Flower is taking the title held by former CIO Randy Mott, who left in HP’s big summer shakeup.

But many of those same companies tend be much more optimistic about smartphones: The platforms seem manageable and finite, and consumers seem willing to pay for stuff on an iPhone or Android that they’d never shell out for on their laptops.

I think that conventional wisdom is overblown — more wishful than realistic. Still, it’s the conventional wisdom among many media executives I talk to.

Here’s a nice illustration of that, via a new Accenture survey. The consulting firm asked “130 leaders and decision-makers in the Media and Entertainment industry” about their digital content plans, and found a pretty strong consensus — they think consumers and dollars are going to flock to mobile in the next couple years.

What about the iPad and any other tablets? We’ll assume that the big media guys are including tablets in the “mobile/wireless” answer in the second poll question. But note that they’re clearly less enthusiastic about tablets, compared to phones, in the first question.

Accenture notes that if you carve up responses by industry, things change a bit. For instance, publishers who embraced the iPad (and the Kindle, and the Nook) from the get-go think that tablets will be the favorite device for 36 percent of their customers in the near future.

The world’s largest mobile-phone maker by volume said it will consolidate its research and product-development sites so that each has a clear role and mission, and expects to expand some sites and to contract or close others.

Nokia also said it plans to outsource all Symbian software activities and move about 3,000 employees to Accenture PLC. Accenture, meanwhile, will provide mobility software services to Nokia for future smartphones.

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We can call this the “cord shaving” argument, and if I could remember where I first saw the term, I’d be happy to give them credit. (My hunch is that it was BTIG Research’s Rich Greenfield. Or maybe digital-media-executive-turned-aggregator Jason Hirschhorn. Or maybe Video Nuze, etc.).

This one has a nice ring of logic to it: You’d have to be a very committed non-cable watcher to dump your entire service and make do with the Web stuff. But depending on your viewing habits, it might be quite easy to substitute, say, Netflix for HBO.

It would be cheaper, too–you’d just have to wait a while to see “Boardwalk Empire” or “Game of Thrones.” (Though I’d still pay a premium to see Kenny Powers.)*

And that may be what we’re starting to see now.

Here, for instance, is a new study from Accenture that draws a connection between Web video watchers and a drop in premium cable: It figures the Internet is responsible for an eight percent drop in subscriptions.

Alas, just as with the cord-cutting debate, we may be stuck, for a while, with competing sets of data.

Market researcher SNL Kagan, for instance, says that in the last quarter of 2010, subscriptions shot up for CBS’ Showtime and Liberty’s Starz, while Time Warner’s HBO stayed steady.

These are apples and oranges data points: The Accenture numbers are taken worldwide, while the Kagan numbers are U.S.-only. And they cover different time periods, too. Etc.

Still, there’s a reason why Time Warner CEO Jeff Bewkes has been so forceful about bashing Netflix publicly. Investors, at least, are concerned that the Web service (and perhaps Web video in general) will indeed cut into HBO’s business. So this won’t be the last we hear about this one.

And here’s one of the least unsafe-for-work Kenny Powers clips I could find. But it is still not going to be safe for some workplaces. It is awesome, though:

* For the concerned reader who inquired: No, you can’t get anything HBO shows via Netflix’ streaming service. But if you’re patient enough, and you subscribe to the DVD tier of the service, you’ll be able to get the shows and movies that way.

The consulting firm discussed some of its research in advance of the upcoming Consumer Electronics Show, which formally kicks off Jan. 7 in Las Vegas.

For starters, service contracts associated with technology products might seem like an area that cash-strapped consumers might forgo in tough economic times. Yet some 49 percent of the vendors surveyed by Accenture said consumers had increased purchases of new service contracts during the downturn; 22 percent said sales hadn’t changed, and 18 percent said sales had declined. (The remainder said they don’t offer service contracts).

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One company developing them is Enthiosys, a product consulting firm based in Mountain View, Calif. Its founder and chief executive, Luke Hohmann, recently led a workshop in Chicago for intellectual-property strategists from Microsoft (MSFT), General Electric (GE), AT&T (T), Accenture (ACN) and other companies.

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Caso says the group is likely to take another leg down, forecasting that April conference call season will see most of the companies issue guidance below Street expectations. He writes that “demand remains lackluster and decision-making slow.” Customers budgets are down 10-20 percent this year, he contends, but with many operating on a month-to-month basis and focused solely on cutting costs. Caso writes that he is hearing pricing has come down close to 10 percent, and that existing contracts are being repriced. He also says the sector is seeing increasing competition for deals from Accenture (ACN) and IBM (IBM).

Caso cut his ratings today on Cognizant (CTSH), Wipro (WIT), Infosys (INFY) and Syntel (SYNT) to Underperform from Market Perform. He also reduced EPS estimates for all four companies. Caso said the stocks could see another 15-30 percent decline from Friday’s close.

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