Oracle has reported a better-than-expected increase in third-quarter revenue and profit due to the continued strength of its cloud business.
Total revenues increased 3% to $9.2bn in fiscal Q3 ended 28 February 2017, compared to $9.01bn for the same period in 2016.
Profit rose to $2.24bn, or $0.53 per share, in the quarter, from $2.14bn, or $0.50 per share, last year.
Short-term deferred revenues were $7.4bn, up 7% in US dollars and constant currency compared with a year ago.
Oracle’s total cloud and On-Premise software revenues rose 5% to $7.37bn, while hardware revenues dropped 9% to $1.03bn. Total services revenues grew 3% to $812m.
Cloud software as a service (SaaS) and platform as a service (PaaS) revenues were $1bn, up 74% in constant currency.
Meanwhile, the company’s traditional software licensing business declined a further 16% to $1.4bn.
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On an annualised non-GAAP basis, Oracle’s total cloud business has reached the $5 bn mark and the company’s SaaS and PaaS businesses increased at the rate of 85% in Q3.
Oracle CEO Safra Catz said: “Our new, large, fast growing, high-margin cloud businesses are driving Oracle’s total revenue and earnings up and improving nearly every important non-GAAP business metric you care to inspect.”
Oracle chairman and CTO Larry Ellison and CEO Mark Hurd said the company has several advantages over Amazon and Salesforce.
Hurd said it is “just a matter of when” to pass Salesforce in cloud revenue.
Ellison said: “Our new Gen2 IaaS is both faster and lower cost than Amazon Web Services.
“And now 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.”
Last month, Mark Hurd laid in to Amazon Web Services calling the company’s infrastructure ‘old’.
Read more: Cloud wars: Oracle CEO labels AWS infrastructure ‘old’
Speaking at a Goldman Sacks Technology and Internet Conference in San Francisco, the co-CEO said that “Amazon’s infrastructure, to be very blunt, is old,” while claiming its own technology is “newer and fresher.”
