Oracle had a better fourth quarter than anticipated, posting a higher-than-expected net profit mostly due to the company’s purchase of PeopleSoft.
Among Oracle’s other financial results for the quarter were an increase of 4% in GAAP earnings per share were to $0.20, and a 36% increase in non-GAAP earnings per share.
“Oracle’s database business delivered another strong growth quarter,” said Oracle CEO, Larry Ellison. “The latest Gartner, IDC and Morgan Stanley database surveys all agree that Oracle is increasing database market share while IBM’s DB2 database is in decline.
“This quarter marks an acceleration of that trend as more and more companies move their database applications off mainframes onto Oracle Grids,” said Ellison.
Oracle reported an increase in fourth quarter GAAP total software revenues of 24%, reaching $3.12 billion, and a 31% increase in non-GAAP total software revenues, which were $3.30 billion.
Oracle had strong performance with database and middleware new license revenues, which went up 16% to $1.26 billion. Even stronger was its increase in GAAP applications new license revenues, which shot up 52%. GAAP services revenues climbed 35%. Bloomberg News writes:
The PeopleSoft purchase and the March acquisition of Retek Inc. probably boosted sales of licenses for business applications by 30 percent to $300 million, Prudential Equity Group analyst Brent Thill in San Francisco estimated before the results.
Ellison started “Project Fusion” to show Oracle and former PeopleSoft customers how the company will weave together features from both sets of programs. Last week, he hired former Microsoft finance chief Greg Maffei, who led more than $9 billion in investments in cable, telephone and Internet companies.
“The rapid integration of PeopleSoft into our business contributed to the strong growth in both applications sales and profits that we saw in the quarter,” said Oracle President, Safra Catz. “The combination of increased organic growth plus a carefully targeted acquisition strategy have pushed Oracle’s revenue and profits to record levels.”
Today in early afternoon trading, Oracle shares were up 75 cents at $13.58 on Nasdaq. Yesterday, Oracle shares closed on the Nasdaq at $12.83.
Chris is a staff writer for murdok. Visit murdok for the latest ebusiness news.
