Oracle results beat expectations

Oracle has reported a 28 per cent rise in year-on-year earnings in its first quarter results for 2009.

Revenue was up 18 per cent to $5.3 billion (2.9 billion) and net income was $1.1 billion (611 million), up 28 per cent compared to last year

Software revenues were up 20 per cent to $4.2 billion (2.3 billion), while new software license sales increased by 14 per cent to $1.2 billion (666 million).

Oracle chief executive Larry Ellison said during an analyst conference call that the firm was well placed to continue to beat economic downward trends because of strength in market dominant and high-margin parts of it business.

He said the licence renewal business made up "about half of our business". "This is an extremely high-margin business and continues to grow," he added.

Ellison also said: "The fact we sell more database than anyone else means we can invest more in improving our database."

But the software giant's long fought acquisition of BEA was also paying dividends, contributing to make middleware the product line with the fastest growth, according to the Oracle chief.

"We think [we have grown] from number two to number one in middleware," he said. "We have either passed IBM or are about to pass IBM."

Charles Phillips, Oracle president was also present on the call to answer questions about upcoming products announcements, given that its annual OpenWorld user conference opens in San Francisco this Sunday.

While he refused to give specifics, Phillips said an update to its latest 11g database would be delivered sometime in the quarter and confirmed a database-related announcement would be made at the OpenWorld event.