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Oracle, despite expensive acquisitions and legal headaches during the past 12 months, continues to report the double-whammy of business nirvana: increasing revenue and profits.
The world’s second-largest software maker said March 24 in its fiscal third-quarter report that revenue for the quarter ended Feb. 28 jumped 37 percent to $8.76 billion.
Oracle also said its net income rose to $2.1 billion, or 41 cents a share, compared to $1.19 billion (23 cents a share) in the same period a year earlier.
Earnings for the quarter were 54 cents a share, excluding a few one-time items. Wall Street analysts had expected Oracle to report earnings of $8.7 billion, or 50 cents a share.
Oracle was coming off a highly successful second quarter in which it reported $8.6 billion in total revenue, up 47 percent from the previous year, and profits that were up 28 percent.
Oracle also declared a quarterly cash dividend of 6 cents per share of outstanding common stock, up from 5 cents last quarter.
CEO and co-founder Larry Ellison cited an upsurge in new business, based largely on much of the Sun Microsystems IP the company added in January 2010, as a key to its continued profit/revenue growth.
“In Q3 we signed several large hardware and software deals with some of the biggest names in cloud computing,” Ellison said.
“For example, Salesforce.com’s new multi-year contract enables them to continue building virtually all of their cloud services on top of the Oracle database and Oracle middleware. Oracle is the technology that powers the cloud.”
Ellison said that interest in the company’s Java-based Exadata database server — which he has touted as the fastest such server in the world — contnues to grow. In December, Ellison said the so-called “pipeline” for new business from Exadata has doubled in the last 11 months to nearly $2 billion-indicating the amount of potential sales revenue in the coming nine months.
Acquisitions Haven’t Hurt Bottom Line
Oracle’s acquisitions of Sun ($7.4 billion) and 10 other companies — including e-commerce software vendor Art Technology Group for $1 billion and health-care app maker Phase Forward for $685 million — in the last 13 months haven’t affected the balance sheet adversely.
“We now have a broader portfolio,” co-president Mark Hurd told analysts and media members on a conference call. “We can now offer incremental value in a wide array of product areas. We also have many more opportunities to cross-sell, because we have so many more things that our customers are interested in.
“If you deliver what you promise to deliver, and build a relationship with that customer, you will be rewarded. It’s the old saying: ‘The best place to get a second sale is to go back to the first.'”