Oracle reported quarterly earnings on Wednesday that beat analysts’ expectations as software revenues popped. But the company’s overall revenue fell slightly short of estimates.
-EPS: 69 cents, adjusted, vs. 62 cents expected by a Thomson Reuters consensus estimate
-Revenue: $9.21 billion vs. $9.255 billion expected by a Thomson Reuters consensus estimate
The company also raised its dividend to 19 cents, from 15 cents. Shares rose more than 3 percent after hours.
“Our new, large, fast growing, high-margin cloud businesses are driving Oracle’s total revenue and earnings up,” Oracle CEO Safra Catz said in a statement.
In the third quarter, cloud software as a service (SaaS) and platform as a service (PaaS) revenues rose 73 percent.
Oracle is mounting a transition from its database business to cloud computing and SaaS. Total cloud revenues are now 13 percent of the company’s total sales, up from 8 percent this time lsat year. In the last year, the company agreed to acquire NetSuite, a pioneer in cloud computing, for $9.3 billion.
Still, the company’s on-premise revenues make up 67 percent of the company’s total revenues, down from 70 percent in the year-ago period.
The enterprise technology company has been battling companies like Salesforce to reach $10 billion in cloud services revenue. Amazon, meanwhile, dominates the cloud market.
But Oracle chairman Larry Ellison and co-CEO Mark Hurd said that Oracle has some advantages over Amazon and Salesforce. Hurd said it is “just a matter of when” to pass Salesforce in cloud revenue.
( Salesforce said on Tuesday it expects to achieve its goal in the next year with sales of $10.15 billion to $10.20 billion, “faster than any enterprise software company in history.”)
[N]ow our biggest customers can run their largest and most demanding Oracle database workloads in the Oracle Cloud – something that is absolutely impossible to do in the Amazon Cloud,” Ellison said.
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