Oracle results beat expectations

Any doubts from earlier analyst predictions have been put to bed as Oracle announced its latest results last night.

The mammoth company confirmed total revenues of $8.6 billion (5.5 billion) for the second quarter of fiscal 2011 a rise of 47 per cent when compared to the same period last year. Net income also rose by 28 per cent to reach $1.9 billion.

Software still dominated the company's earnings. New software licences made Oracle $2 billion whilst updates and support revenues rose by 12 per cent to $3.6 billion.

Hardware revenues were still respectable, however, with total product revenues hitting $1.1 billion for the quarter.

"Since joining Oracle I've met with and visited many customers that have expressed a high level of enthusiasm around our strategy of engineering hardware and software that works together," said new Oracle president and ex-HP chief executive (CEO), Mark Hurd.

He claimed the near $2 billion revenues for the Exadata line the mix of Oracle's database system and Sun Microsystems' storage servers showed customers were "planning to increase their investment in Oracle technology."

Oracle CEO, Larry Ellison, concluded the company's statement with a little dig at its competitors.

"Our new generation of Exadata, Exalogic and SPARC Supercluster computers deliver much better performance and much lower cost than the fastest machines from IBM and HP," he said.