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Oracle tops Q1 estimates

Oracle's cloud business, including infrastructure as a service, came to $1.5 billion, up 51 percent.
Written by Natalie Gagliordi, Contributor
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Image: James Martin/CNET

Oracle released first quarter financial results Thursday after the bell. The Redwood Shores, Calif.-based company reported a net income of $2.2 billion, or 52 cents per share.

Non-GAAP earnings were 62 cents per share on a revenue of $9.2 billion, up 7 percent from the year prior. Wall Street was expecting Oracle to report first quarter earnings of 60 cents a share on revenue of $9.03 billion.

Oracle's cloud business, including infrastructure as a service (IaaS), came to $1.5 billion, up 51 percent. The company's SaaS revenues were up 62 percent to $1.1 billion. Total on-premise revenue was almost flat at $5.9 billion, and revenue for new software licenses was down 6 percent to $966 million.

In a prepared statement, Oracle CEO Mark Hurd touted the strength of the company's cloud business, taking swipes at several cloud software rivals in the process.

"With SaaS revenue up 62 percent, our cloud applications business continues to grow more than twice as fast as Salesforce.com," said Oracle CEO, Mark Hurd. "ERP is our largest and most important cloud applications business. We now have about 5,000 Fusion ERP customers plus 12,000 NetSuite ERP customers in the Oracle Cloud. That's 30 times more ERP customers than Workday."

Meanwhile, Oracle founder and chairman Larry Ellison teased the release of "the world's first fully autonomous database cloud service," which Oracle will likely announce during its upcoming Open World conference.

"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. "Using AI to eliminate most sources of human error enables Oracle to offer database SLA's that guarantee 99.995 percent reliability while charging much less than AWS."

In terms of guidance, analysts expect Q2 earnings of 68 cents per share on $9.49 billion in revenue. Oracle responded with EPS guidance in between 64 cents and 68 cents on 2 to 4 percent revenue growth. Oracle's stock has been up immediately after hours but swiftly dropped 5 percent below the closing price.

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