Oracle announces better than expected profits

Oracle has beaten some analysts' projections and reported a strong last quarter with income up 28 per cent.

Net income stood at $1.9bn (£1.2bn) for the second quarter of the year, up 28 per cent on last year’s results, and revenues were up 47 per cent to $8.6bn. Hardware sales were at $1.1bn for the quarter and software licence revenue grew 21 per cent year-on-year to about $2bn.

The company spent much of the quarterly earnings call expounding on the virtues of the hardware and software systems that have resulted from the merger of Oracle and Sun, particularly the Exadata platform.

“Since joining Oracle I’ve met with and visited many customers that have expressed a high level of enthusiasm around our strategy of engineering hardware and software that works together,” said Oracle president Mark Hurd.

“That enthusiasm translates into an Exadata pipeline that has now grown to nearly $2bn. That number is a good leading indicator that customers are planning to increase their investment in Oracle technology.”

Ellison took the earnings call as an opportunity to put down HP and said that IBM was the main target in the high-end server market, since HP owed its position to an aging installed base of systems.

“Sun’s new Sparc Supercluster computer shattered the world record for database transaction processing performance by running three times faster than IBM’s fastest computer, and a stunning 7.5 times faster than HP's best-ever database performance,” said Oracle CEO Larry Ellison.

“Our new generation of Exadata, Exalogic and Sparc Supercluster computers deliver much better performance and much lower cost than the fastest machines from IBM and HP.”