Oracle's bet on the cloud pays off as revenues soar

Oracle has posted revenue increases of 6% year-on-year, with the cloud providing the boost the company needs, increasing by 44% to hit $1.5 billion (1.13 billion).

Cloud SaaS revenues were responsible for the bulk of this revenue boost, with the subsector increasing a mammoth 55% compared to the company's fiscal 2017 results. Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) revenues were up 21% to $396 million (297.25 million).

"Overall cloud revenue growth of 44% drove our quarterly revenue and earnings higher," said Oracle CEO, Safra Catz. "With non-GAAP Cloud SaaS Applications growth of 49% leading the way, Oracle delivered 14% non-GAAP earnings per share growth and 6% overall revenue growth. Our success in the quarter was based on the increasing scale and the gathering momentum in our cloud business. I expect the business to continue to grow and strengthen over the coming quarters."

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The company explained its Fusion ERP and Fusion HCM SaaS application suites were the highest performing applications in its suite, with revenues for those two alone growing 65% in the quarter. Putting a focus on SaaS particularly is part of the company's mission to become the leader in enterprise back-office SaaS applications, Mark Hurd, Oracle CEO Mark Hurd explained.

"We expect to extend our lead by selling around $2 billion (1.5 billion) in new enterprise SaaS application cloud subscriptions over the coming four quarters. That's more new SaaS sales than any of our competitors," he added.

The company has big plans to build upon its cloud-powered enterprise applications too. It's working on an automated, "self-driving" database that will make it cheaper and more reliable to run a database compared to using Amazon Cloud.

"The new artificially intelligent Oracle database is fully automated and requires no human labor for administration," Oracle CTO, Larry Ellison said. "If a security vulnerability is detected, the database immediately patches itself while running. No other system can do anything like this.

"Best of all, we guarantee the price of running the Oracle Autonomous Database in the Oracle Cloud is less than half the cost of running a database in the Amazon Cloud."

Clare is the founder of Blue Cactus Digital, a digital marketing company that helps ethical and sustainability-focused businesses grow their customer base.

Prior to becoming a marketer, Clare was a journalist, working at a range of mobile device-focused outlets including Know Your Mobile before moving into freelance life.

As a freelance writer, she drew on her expertise in mobility to write features and guides for ITPro, as well as regularly writing news stories on a wide range of topics.