Oracle tops Q2 earnings target, maintains cloud sales goals for 2016

Oracle closed out this round of tech earnings season and published second quarter financial results after the bell on Wednesday.

The tech giant reported a net income of $2.2 billion, or 51 cents per share (statement).

Non-GAAP earnings were 63 cents per share on a revenue of $9 billion.

Wall Street was looking for earnings of 60 cents per share with $9.06 billion in revenue.

Once again, the hardware and software maker attributed the results to a stronger-than-expected U.S. Dollar over other currencies worldwide.

Nevertheless, Oracle CEO Safra Catz asserted in prepared remarks that Oracle was pleased with earnings results while growing its cloud department revenue, highlighting double-digit jumps for both its Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) and Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS) offerings.

Combined SaaS and PaaS revenues rang up to $484 million during the quarter, up 34 percent. Total cloud revenue was $649 million, up 26 percent.

Oracle's executive chairman Larry Ellison added the company is still on track to sell more than $1.5 billion in new SaaS and PaaS business by the end of the 2016 fiscal year.

"That is considerably more SaaS and PaaS new business than any other cloud services provider including salesforce.com," Ellison wrote.

For the current quarter, Wall Street is looking for non-GAAP earnings of 65 cents per share with $9.28 billion in revenue.

UPDATE: Oracle also announced on Wednesday that it appointed Intel president Renée James to its board of directors.

All Oracle board members are elected to one-year terms, after which they are expected to stand for election. The next election will be during the company's next annual stockholders meeting in November 2016.

James was touted to have been appointed after a unanimous decision. Also previously a director at VMware, her election is effective immediately, bringing Oracle's board up to 13 directors.