Oracle has exceeded the expectations of analysts by raking in $9.2 billion for the first quarter of the 2018 fiscal year, achieving $2.2 billion net income.
Cloud is at the core of this strong start, having generated revenues of $1.47 billion, up by over 50 percent in a year.
While expectations were not far short of reality, Oracle generated earnings of $0.62 per share, a $0.02 improvement on the predicted figure.
Services revenues also contributed to this growth, with a six percent bringing the total figure up to $860 million.
A familiar pattern begins to form with hardware revenues down for the beginning of the fiscal year, now by five percent year on year, with the organization shifting its focus.
In light of these results, Oracle CEO, Larry Ellison, said: “We sell double what Salesforce does in absolute dollars… We are taking share across the entire apps ecosystem and from our cloud competitors as well.”
“In a couple of weeks, we will announce the world’s first fully autonomous database cloud service… Based on machine learning, the latest version of Oracle is a totally automated ‘self-driving’ system that does not require human beings to manage or tune the database,” Ellison said.
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An indication of the company’s ambitious approach to achieving growth within the cloud space is its hiring initiative, recently announcing that it intends to hire 1,000 new cloud professionals throughout EMEA.
Oracle is looking to take on new employees with skills in finance, recruitment, HR, sales and supply chains, moving to build the business in all facets.
