Oracle Grows Earnings and Gears Up for New Product Debuts

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Oracle reported its first quarter fiscal 2014 earnings late Wednesday, showing continued traction for its engineered systems hardware business.

For the quarter, revenue was reported at $8.4 billion, which is a 2 percent year-over-year gain. Net income rose by 8 percent, coming in at $2.2 billion for the quarter. Among the revenue highlights is the fact that new software licenses and cloud software subscriptions revenues rose by 5 percent to $1.7 billion for the quarter. Hardware Systems revenues were reported at $1.26 billion, which is a 7 percent year-over-year decline.

Moving forward, Oracle provided second quarter fiscal 2014 guidance for total revenue growth to range from negative one percent to positive two percent in U.S. dollars. A good chunk of the negative outlook is coming from the hardware unit. Hardware product revenue is expected to range from negative 11 percent to negative 1 percent.

Oracle President and CFO Safra Catz noted during her company’s earning call that the Engineered Systems business component of Oracle’s hardware sales is growing.

“Exadata bookings look very good,” Katz said. “Revenues from Exalytics, SuperCluster and the Oracle Database Appliance all grew over 100 percent.”

Oracle President Mark Hurd added to Katz’s optimism on Engineered Systems, noting that in the last two quarters, Oracle has shipped almost 2,000 systems.

“This quarter, we saw great unit growth north of 60 percent as we shipped nearly 800 systems,” Hurd said. “Nearly 40 percent of Exadata Systems were sold to new customers, and we expect to grow our business with these customers over time.”

Hurd added that in his view, Oracle is gaining a material amount of unit market share with its Engineered Systems portfolio.

Database

Oracle is well known for its namesake Oracle Database and it’s a solution that continues to grow revenues as well.

“Database continues to be very strong, double-digit growth again this quarter,” Hurd said.

Next week, Oracle’s annual OpenWorld event is taking place and the company will make a number of product announcements. One of them that Hurd mentioned during the earnings call is the introduction of the Oracle 12c in-memory database.

“We’ll be talking about it being able to deliver 100x faster application performance using our new architectural approach,” Hurd said.

Hurd added that Oracle will also have cloud news as well as new releases for its Human Capital Management (HCM) solutions.

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