Oracle delivers strong third quarter, to hit Sun profit target

Updated: Oracle delivered strong fiscal third quarter results as the company landed large hardware and software deals. The company touted its Exadata and Exalogic sequential sales growth.

The software company reported third quarter earnings of $2.11 billion, or 41 cents a share, on revenue of $8.76 billion. Non-GAAP earnings were 54 cents a share. Wall Street was expecting Oracle to report earnings of 50 cents a share on revenue of $8.67 billion.

In addition, Oracle raised its dividend to 6 cents a share from 5 cents a share.

Oracle president Safra Catz said that the company was "completely confident" that it will deliver $1.5 billion in profit from the Sun business. Mark Hurd, Oracle's other president, said that all geographies delivered revenue growth 30 percent or higher.

Meanwhile, Oracle CEO Larry Ellison gloated in a statement as Salesforce.com inked a new multi-year database and middleware contract.

Also: Time for the decoder ring: Oracle ends Itanium support, ruckus ensues

Key points from Oracle's conference call:

• Oracle projected fourth quarter non-GAAP earnings of 69 cents a share to 73 cents a share. Revenue will be up 10 percent to 14 percent from a year ago.
• Sun will exceed the $1.5 billion operating profit goal for Oracle, but Catz said "we are really no longer able to identify the exact contribution Sun has made to our operating profit this year."

Oracle president Mark Hurd said:

We saw sequential unit and revenue growth of over 50% in Exadata and Exalogic. As we head into Q4 we expect to see even higher growth. The pipeline for Exalogic is building very rapidly, as well with customers billing out their private clouds with both Exalogic and Exadata. And yes, we are in the cloud. Whether it's collaborating with Amazon so that customers can launch an entire Oracle software stack on EC2, or whether it's working directly with a very large federal law agency to build out a private cloud, gain a 10X performance increase as they improve their mission and better protect the United States. Public or private, we are in the cloud.

By the numbers for the fiscal third quarter:

• Database and middleware revenue was $4.09 billion, up 19 percent from a year ago. Of that sum, new software licenses revenue was $1.57 billion. Updates and support accounted for the remainder.
• Application revenue was $1.85 billion, up 17 percent. Of that sum, new software license revenue was $639 million.
• New software license revenue was $2.21 billion, up 29 percent from a year ago. Software license and product support revenue was $3.74 billion, up 13 percent from a year ago. Total software revenue was $5.95 billion, up 19 percent from a year ago.
• Hardware systems product revenue was $1.03 billion. Hardware systems support revenue was $629 million. Hardware revenue for the third quarter was $1.66 billion, or 19 percent of revenue.
• Services revenue was $1.14 billion, up 23 percent from a year ago.
• On-demand revenue was $341 million, up 61 percent from a year ago.
• By geography, Americas revenue was $4.5 billion with Europe, Middle East and Africa checking in at $2.81 billion. Asia Pacific revenue was $1.44 billion.
• Oracle ended the quarter with 107,870 employees.