Oracle beats chest over cloud growth

Ellison and Hurd thumb nose at Salesforce and Workday as quarterly cloud sales boom 31 per cent in constant currency

After growing by over a quarter in its most recent quarter, Oracle's cloud business is now more than a tenth the size of its traditional on-premise software business.

In its fiscal Q2 ending 30 November, Oracle's total SaaS, PaaS and IaaS cloud sales reached $649m, a 26 per cent annual hike in dollar terms.

Ignoring currency headwinds, cloud growth stood at 31 per cent.

In contrast, the New York-listed vendor's total sales fell six per cent in US dollars to $9bn, with sales of traditional on-premise software down seven per cent to $6.4bn. Hardware revenues fell 16 per cent to $1.1bn.

Oracle joint chief executive Mark Hurd declared Q2 "a very strong quarter for our cloud business", adding that SaaS and PaaS bookings were up 68 per cent in dollar terms.

"We did 100 Fusion HCM deals and over 300 Fusion ERP deals in the quarter. We now have more than 1,500 ERP customers in the cloud - that's at least ten times more ERP customers than Workday," he said.

Breaking down cloud sales by segment, Oracle said SaaS and PaaS sales rose 34 per cent (39 per cent in constant currency) to $484m and IaaS sales grew seven per cent (11 per cent in constant currency) to $165m.

Oracle also topped its Q2 profit expectations, with non-GAAP earnings per share of $0.63 coming in four cents ahead of the mid-point of its guidance, despite currency headwinds.

Oracle executive chairman Larry Ellison said: "We are still on-target to sell and book more than $1.5bn of new SaaS and PaaS business this fiscal year.

"That is considerably more SaaS and PaaS new business than any other cloud services provider including salesforce.com."