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Oracle’s cloud sales approach $1bn, attacks Workday and AWS in results

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Oracle has announced total revenues of $8.6 billion (£6.6bn) in its first quarter 2017 financial results, up 3% in constant currency and with the cloud change at the heart of it.

Addressing analysts after the results were announced, Safra Catz, Oracle co-CEO, said in her first remarks, as transcribed by Seeking Alpha: “Clearly, we are pleased with our results, with the most obvious thing being that we overachieved again in the cloud especially in the United States. As you all know, we have pivoted the organisation to go after the cloud and we are outperforming even our most aggressive expectations.”

Cloud software as a service (SaaS) and platform as a service (PaaS) revenues were $798m, up 79% in constant currency, while total cloud revenues – in other words, factoring in infrastructure as a service (IaaS) with it, were $969m, up 61% respectively. Oracle expects to sell more than $2bn of SaaS and PaaS in annually recurring revenue.

In the press material, Oracle again fired shots at its opponents – noting that the previous quarter has seen the sign up of ‘more ERP customers than Workday has sold in the history of their company’ – while in the analyst call Larry Ellison, Oracle CTO, had his sights set on Amazon Web Services with the rollout of new second generation IaaS data centres.

“For the first time, we have this big technology advantage in the infrastructure as a service,” said Ellison. “We expect this will enable Oracle to accelerate our infrastructure as a service business to the same high growth rates that we’re currently experiencing in both SaaS and PaaS.”

The key move from Oracle over the past quarter has been the company’s acquisition of cloud ERP rival NetSuite for $9.3bn in July. Only one mention was made of the deal on the analyst call – Catz confirmed that the antitrust reviews had all been cleared for the deal except in the US.

Other notes from the financial results showed short-term deferred revenue at $9.5bn, up 5% in constant currency compared with this time last year, while operating income was $2.6bn.