Ellison: Oracle now world's second largest SaaS company

Chief executive bullish on Oracle's cloud ambitions despite lukewarm Q4 results

Oracle claimed it is now the second-largest cloud SaaS company in the world as its Q4 results left Wall Street cold.

The software and server maker's share price fell by more than five per cent as it announced that turnover for the three months to 31 May inched up three per cent year on year to $11.3bn (£6.6bn), almost $200m short of forecasts.

Net profit for the quarter also disappointed, falling four per cent to $3.6bn.

Cloud remains a growth hotspot, however, with SaaS and PaaS sales leaping 25 per cent to $322m and IaaS sales jumping 13 per cent to $128m.

Oracle's ever bullish chief executive Larry Ellison said the firm plans to increase its focus on the the fluffy form of IT, becoming number one in both the SaaS and PaaS categories.

"Oracle is now the second-largest SaaS company in the world," Ellison (pictured) proclaimed.

"In SaaS, we're in front of everybody but Salesforce.com. In IaaS we're larger and more profitable than Rackspace. We have by far the most complete portfolio of modern SaaS and PaaS products in the industry."

Oracle claimed its cloud subscription business is approaching an annual run rate of $2bn. That would still represent just five per cent of its total turnover, however.

In Q4, Oracle's total software and cloud revenues rose four per cent to $8.9bn, while hardware systems revenue sidled up two per cent to $1.5bn.

For fiscal 2014 overall, Oracle's revenue rose three per cent to $38.3bn.