Oracle kicks BEA; financials solid

Oracle used its fiscal second quarter earnings release to kick around another competitor--BEA Systems.

"We continue to gain market share in applications from SAP, in middleware from BEA, and in database from IBM," said Oracle President, Charles Phillips. "In Q2 our middleware new license growth was exceptionally strong. We expect to pass BEA in total middleware new license sales later this year."

Cutting through all the noise, Oracle had a solid quarter, which is usually difficult to compare exactly to rivals such as SAP. Meanwhile, Oracle's never-ending parade of acquisitions makes it tough to gauge organic growth. Oracle's fiscal second quarter earnings excluding charges were in line with estimates at 22 cents a share on sales of $4.16 billion. Under generally accepted accounting practices Oracle's earnings were 18 cents a share.  The conference call will determine whether there's any Linux chatter.

Among the takeaways in the quarter:

--Is Oracle a support company or a software company? By revenue it's a support company. In the second quarter, license updates and product support revenue was $2 billion or 48 percent of total sales. New software licenses revenue was $1.2 billion. The remainder of revenue was attributed to consulting, on demand, services and education categories. 

--Database and middleware new software revenue was $859 million, up 9 percent from the same quarter a year ago.

--Application software revenue was up 28 percent from a year ago to $340 million.

--Software license updates and product support revenue was $728 million, up 45 percent from a year ago.

--In databases, Europe/Middle East/Africa had the strongest growth, up 21 percent from a year ago. Asia Pacific was up 5 percent and the America's posted growth of 2 percent.

--Oracle ended the quarter with 56,133 employees.