Oracle has reported an increase in profit for Q4, despite lower revenues, as the company continues to see massive growth in its cloud business.
Profit for the quarter increased to $2.81bn, or $0.66 per share, from $2.76bn, or $0.62 per share, last year.
Revenues were $10.6bn, down 1% in US dollars and flat in constant currency. Including the company’s infrastructure-as-a-service business, total cloud revenues increased 49% to $859m.
Oracle is still lagging behind in the cloud market despite rapid growth. The company is competing with Salesforce and Workday, which offer software and storage only on the web.
Salesforce’s revenues reached $7.7bn in its most recent quarter, after increasing 27%, placing it closer to the $10bn target.
While Oracle’s on-premise software revenues were flat at $8.4bn, the company’s cloud software as a service (SaaS) and platform as a service (PaaS) revenues increased 66% to $690m.
Oracle executive chairman and CTO Larry Ellison said: "We expect that the SaaS and PaaS hyper-growth we experienced in FY16 will continue on for the next few years.
"That gives us a fighting chance to be the first cloud company to reach $10 billion in SaaS and PaaS revenue."
The company added more than 1,600 new SaaS customers and over 2,000 new PaaS customers in Q4. In Fusion ERP alone, more than 800 new cloud customers were added.
Oracle CEO Mark Hurd said: "Today, Oracle has nearly 2,600 Fusion ERP customers in the Oracle Public Cloud – that’s ten-times more cloud ERP customers than Workday."
Earlier this year, Oracle agreed to acquire construction software maker Textura for about $663m to expand its cloud offerings for construction and engineering industry.
