Oracle's autonomous database sales more than doubled in Q2
Oracle's autonomous database cloud revenues grew by more than 100 percent in Q2, the company said Thursday in its second quarter financial results.
"It's still early days, but the Oracle Autonomous Database already has thousands of customers running in our Gen2 Public Cloud," CTO Larry Ellison said in a statement. Its growth rate, he said, is expected "to increase dramatically as we release our Autonomous Database running on our Gen2 Cloud@Customer into our huge on-premise installed base over the next several months."
Oracle's non-GAAP net income for the quarter was $3 billion, or 90 cents per share, on revenue of $9.6 billion.
Wall Street was looking for earnings of 88 cents per share on revenue of $9.65 billion.
Cloud Services and License Support revenues were $6.8 billion, while Cloud License and On-Premise License revenues came to $1.1 billion.
Oracle also touted the growth of its cloud ERP businesses: Fusion ERP grew revenues by 37 percent, while NetSuite ERP revenues grew 29 percent in Q2.
"This consistent rapid growth in the now multibillion dollar ERP segment of our cloud applications business has enabled Oracle to deliver a double-digit EPS growth rate year-after-year," CEO Safra Catz said in a statement. "I fully expect we will do that again this year."
Oracle's Board of Directors on Thursday also declared a quarterly cash dividend of 24 cents per share of outstanding common stock.
On a conference call, Ellison called the autonomous database and Oracle's ERP products the "two key product areas that will determine Oracle's future in the cloud."
Those two areas, he said, "will enable success of other application and infrastructure products in adjacent market segments." It's already happening, he said, with ERP creating sales opportunities for Oracle in cloud HCM.
Meanwhile, Ellison said, "SAP's customer base is up for grabs."
"They didn't reroute their applications for the cloud," he continued. "That has created an enormous opportunity for Oracle... A few months from now one of SAP's biggest customers will go live on Fusion ERP."
As far as the autonomous database goes, Ellison said its impact on Oracle and the overall market will be comparable to the release of the first commercial relational database.
"We had one before IBM or anyone else did," he said. "That turned this company from an idea to the company that manages most of the world's information. Autonomous database is that same kind of thing."
Ellison also broached the recent death of Oracle's co-CEO Mark Hurd, saying that the company is not searching for a new co-CEO. Hurd and Catz were a "fantastic team," he said, but it was "an unusual situation."
Instead of appointing a new co-CEO, Oracle will strengthen its overall management team, Ellison said.
"You'll see a lot of announcements at the next layer down who are potential CEOs when both Safra and I retire -- which is not any time soon," he said.