Ellison says Oracle's IaaS and PaaS business will hit 'hyper-growth' in fiscal 2018

Oracle founder predicts that IaaS and PaaS will one day generate more sales for the giant than SaaS following blow-out quarter

Oracle founder Larry Ellison expects the vendor's IaaS and PaaS business to "accelerate into hyper-growth" over the coming 12 months, after strong SaaS sales lit up its fiscal Q4 and full-year 2017 results.

Oracle's share price sky-rocketed by as much as 12 per cent last night, briefly nudging its market cap over the $200bn mark, as better-than-expected cloud growth helped the giant smash its revenue and profit targets.

SaaS sales grew 76 per cent to $1bn in Q4, propelling Oracle's overall cloud revenues up 66 per cent $1.4bn. Total revenues for the quarter rose four per cent to $10.9bn.

Although IaaS and PaaS growth stood at a less spectacular 45 per cent in Q4, to $403m, Ellison (pictured) predicted Oracle's IaaS and PaaS business will soon grow so fast it will "be even bigger than our SaaS business".

"During this new fiscal year, we expect both our PaaS and IaaS businesses to accelerate into hyper growth, the same kind of growth we are seeing with SaaS," Ellison said on the earnings call.

Ellison, who is now Oracle's CTO, also used the call to take another potshot at Salesforce, claiming fiscal 2017 was the second year in a row Oracle sold more cloud annual recurring revenue than its SaaS rival.

"Our rapid SaaS growth is the driving force behind Oracle's revenue and earnings growth in Q4," he said. "The reason we are confident that we will pass Salesforce is because we have a three-fold SaaS application suites for ERP, for HCM and for CRM including financials, procurement, supply chain, manufacturing, human resources, payroll, marketing, sales and service. Salesforce in contrast only competes in three of these nine market areas."

Oracle CEO Safra Catz added to this by saying "cloud has become our predominant growth vehicle".

"We are absolutely thrilled with our Q4 results as software and cloud revenues were four points above the high-end of my guidance and earnings per share was $0.08 above the high-end of my guidance," she added on the call, a transcript of which can be found here.