Oracle Growing Cloud Business Rapidly

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Larry Ellison announced on September 18 that he was stepping down as CEO of Oracle, but little will actually change at the company he has led for four decades. Ellison is now Oracle’s Chairman of the Board and CTO, while Mark Hurd and Safra Katz now jointly hold the CEO role.

The management shift was announced as part of Oracle’s first quarter fiscal 2015 earnings call, which showed continued growth for the company. For the quarter Oracle reported revenue of $8.6 billion for year-over-year revenue growth of three percent.

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One of the big drivers for Oracle’s growth is its expanding cloud business. Cloud revenue reached $477 million for the quarter for a 29 percent year over year growth rate. Looking deeper into Oracle’s cloud business, the Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) and Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS) components reported revenue of $339 million, while Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS) revenue came in at $138 million.

“Q1 results in the cloud were better than expected and with us now three times bigger than Workday,” Oracle CEO Safra Katz said during her company’s earnings call. “Now that’s not enough for us, as our goal is to be bigger than Salesforce and faster growing than Workday while growing cash flow and improving our already high levels of profitability. “

Katz noted that with her appointment to co-CEO along with Mark Hurd, she would no longer have the title of CFO. Instead Katz is now CEO and Principal Financial Official.

“Other than Mark [Hurd] and I reporting to the Board of Directors, of which Larry [Ellison] will be Executive Chairman, no other reporting relationships will change at the company,” Katz said. “We will not be hiring a CFO and my teams will continue to report to me.”

Ellison commented on the call that both Hurd and Katz have done a great job and deserve the title of CEO. That said, Ellison made it clear that he will remain very actively involved in a manner very similar to what he has done to date.

“I’m going to continue to work with Thomas Kurian in software engineering and John Fowler in hardware engineering and Ed Screven and Mark and Safra as I have exactly in the past,” Ellison said. ” So I’m going to continue doing what I have been doing over the last several years, they’re going to continue what they’ve been doing over the last several years.”

Ellison also took the time during his company’s earnings call to reveal Oracle’s big cloud announcement set to be formally detailed at Open World event later this month. The announcement is the official debut of the Oracle Database Cloud service.

“Every single Oracle feature, even our latest high speed and memory processing is included in the Oracle Cloud Database Service,” Ellison said. “Database is our largest software business and database will be our largest cloud service business.”

Sean Michael Kerner is a senior editor at Datamation and InternetNews.com. Follow him on Twitter @TechJournalist

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