Mark Hurd (Oracle)
Oracle has surpassed Wall Street estimates for quarterly results, adding more clients to its cloud services and license support business, sending shares up nearly four per cent in extended trading.
Revenue from the unit, its biggest, rose 2.7 per cent to US$6.64 billion, as more companies shifted to cloud computing from the traditional on-premise model to cut costs.
Analysts on average were expecting a revenue of US$6.62 billion, according to data from Refinitiv.
Oracle, a late entrant to the rapidly growing cloud-based software business, has aggressively stepped up its efforts to catch up with rivals such as Amazon Web Services, Microsoft and Salesforce.
The vendor’s net income rose to US$2.33 billion, or 61 cents per share, in the second quarter ended 30 November, from US$2.21 billion, or 52 cents per share, a year earlier.
“Oracle’s two cloud ERP businesses, Fusion ERP and NetSuite ERP, delivered a combined revenue growth rate of 32 per cent in Q2,” said Mark Hurd, CEO of Oracle. “With nearly 6,000 Fusion ERP customers and over 16,000 NetSuite ERP customers, Oracle is the clear leader in cloud ERP.
“ERP has always been the largest segment of the enterprise applications business, so we have lots of room to grow as customers migrate from their traditional on-premise ERP to the Oracle Fusion ERP Cloud.”
Excluding items, the company earned 80 cents per share, beating the average analyst estimate of 78 cents per share.
Meanwhile, total revenue fell to US$9.56 billion from US$9.59 billion, but beat analyst expectation of US$9.52 billion.
“The Oracle Autonomous Database for data warehousing and transaction processing is the world’s only self-driving database,” said Larry Ellison, CTO of Oracle.
“The Oracle Autonomous Database lowers costs by eliminating human labor and increases reliability by eliminating human error. And Oracle is the only database that automatically patches and upgrades itself while running.”
Shares of Oracle, which have lost nearly four per cent this year, rose to US$47.35 in after-market trading.
(Reporting by Vibhuti Sharma in Bengaluru; Editing by Arun Koyyur)
