American software and cloud services provider Oracle has today reported its third quarter earnings, where it has managed to beat all Wall Street expectations. The company’s revenues and profits have been driven to new heights due to the recent decision to lay more emphasis on cloud products.
According to an official statement, the company’s Q3 revenue amounted to $9.3 billion on the back of earnings of 69 cents per share. This is a 3 percent increase from its $9.01 billion revenue and earnings of 64 cents per share in the same quarter previous year. Wall Street analysts had been expecting the company to post earnings of 62 cents per share, coupled with $9.255 billion in revenues.
In addition, the company reported a non-GAAP operating income of $3.9 billion, which is a 3 percent hike from the previous year. It also added that non-GAAP operating margin for the said quarter was 43 percent, coupled with net income of $2.9 billion. Further, it adds that the EPS figures would’ve been higher by one percent had it not been impacted by U.S. dollar strengthening against foreign currencies. But, the operating cash flow on a trailing twelve-month basis is still a healthy $13.5 billion.
Coming to the star players for the three-month period ended in February, Cloud software as a service (SaaS) and platform as a service (PaaS) revenues peaked to $1 billion. This is a 74 percent increase in constant currency for these assets. The total revenues for the 3rd quarter, including infrastructure as a service (IaaS), increased by 63 percent in constant currency and now amounts to $1.2 billion. It also witnessed a strong growth in its on-premise software business as well. The total revenues amount close to $7.4 billion.
Speaking on their earnings report, Oracle CEO, Safra Catz said,
The hyper-growth we continue to experience in the cloud has rapidly driven both our SaaS and PaaS businesses to scale. 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; total revenue is up, margins are up, operating income is up, net income is up, EPS is up. Take a look. Q3 was a very strong quarter.
Last year, the company unveiled its next-generation cloud computing infrastructure to take on its prominent competitors — Amazon, Microsoft, Salesforce, and others. In the last quarter, Oracle also said that it would be utilizing the resources of its recent acquisitions and integrating them within its own solutions. The major acquisition of enterprise cloud service provider NetSuite has already started seeing through into its products.
With regards to the same, the company has also decided to share more of its profits with the shareholders. In their report, Oracle has increased its revenue from 15 cents to 19 cents in the quarter ended in February’17. This growth has also been reflected in their share prices on the stock market. The share prices have been throttled by close to 6 percent in after market hours.
This increase in its cloud business in such a short span of time has given the company leverage to take jabs at its competitors, primarily Amazon Web Services. Also, Oracle had reported that it surpassed Salesforce in terms of cloud computing revenue. Talking about this bombastic growth, Oracle chairman and CTO, Larry Ellison said,
Both our SaaS and PaaS businesses are doing great, but I’m even more excited about our second generation IaaS business. 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.
