Oracle reports rise in revenues to $9.3 billion

(Photo: Flickr / eMaringolo)Oracle's Buenos Aires headquarters.

Oracle said revenues rose four percent to $9.3 billion while net income increased two percent to $2.6 billion in the quarter ended Feb. 28.

Hardware systems product sales improved by eight percent to $725 million. Hardware systems support revenue rose five percent to $598 million. New software licenses and cloud subscription revenue increased a combined four percent to $2.4 billion. Software license updates and product support revenue rose five percent to $4.6 billion.

Oracle identified increases in new software licenses and cloud subscriptions, and a long-anticipated rise in hardware product revenue as among the growth drivers.

Oracle Chief Financial Officer Safra Catz  said the company's Oracle Cloud Applications and Engineered Systems are both growing rapidly, and are billion dollar run-rate businesses. He noted the company has focused its marketing efforts on these systems that include the Exadata database machine. It has concurrently de-emphasized sales of lower-margin commodity servers.

CEO Larry Ellison said Oracle's engineered system line is experiencing rapid growth, "while throughout the industry traditional high-end server product lines are in steep decline." Oracle will cross the 10,000 mark in sales of engineered systems over the next few months.

Profit margins on engineered systems fell slightly due to Oracle's packing more memory into the latest models without raising prices, Catz said.

Oracle's quarterly cloud application revenue is approaching $300 million. President Mark Hurd said all of the company's strategic Cloud Application Suites, including Fusion Enterprise Resource Planning, Fusion Human Capital Management and Fusion Customer Experience, posted triple-digit revenue growth in the quarter.

Oracle recently launched release eight of Fusion Applications. The release includes some 1,000 new features, and Oracle plans to roll out a similar number in release nine due later this year.

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