Oracle sees revenue, profits soar

Oracle reported improved quarterly earnings on Thursday, in part fueled by sales of its Fusion middleware.

Investors applauded Oracle's first-quarter performance, sending its stock up in after-hours trading to $19.20 (£10.64) a share. During regular trading, Oracle closed at $18.75 a share — up nearly 3.6 percent for the day.

Oracle posted net income of nearly $1.1bn, or 21 cents a share, for the period ending 31 August, up 28 percent from the same period a year ago. Excluding charges, Oracle posted earnings of 29 cents a share, beating Wall Street's estimates by two cents a share, noted Brent Thill, an analyst with Citigroup Global Markets.

Revenue rose to $5.3bn in the first quarter, up 18 percent from the year-ago period. New software licences, a figure investors use to gauge the health of the company, increased 14 percent over last year, to $1.2bn in the quarter. New software licences accounted for 23 percent of Oracle's overall revenue.

"More and more Oracle database customers are buying our integrated suite of standards-based Fusion middleware to modernise their computing environment," Charles Phillips, Oracle president, said in a statement.

But Thill noted that the first-quarter growth for Oracle's enterprise applications business was down 12 percent, far less than his projections for the company.

However, Thill predicted Oracle will post at least a 14 percent growth in licence revenue in the second quarter when compared to year-ago figures, as well as an 18 percent increase in overall revenue.