Oracle has posted results which show net profits up 29%
for the first quarter and used the figures to attack rival
SAP.
Oracle made $670m (£362m) on sales of $3.6bn, which were also up
30% on the same quarter last year.
The company said software revenues were up 29% to $2.7bn, with
database and middleware new licence sales up 15%. Application new
licence sales were up 80%, said the firm.
In addition, services revenues were up 33% to $846m compared to
the same quarter last year.
“We reported record revenues and earnings for the first
quarter,” said Oracle president and chief financial officer Safra
Catz. “We exceeded our guidance on every metric and delivered
strong revenue growth across all product lines and
geographies.”
Fellow Oracle president Charles Phillips used the results to
take another of his regular swipes at rival SAP.
Phillips said, “We’re rapidly taking applications market share
from SAP. Q1 was the second consecutive quarter that Oracle’s
applications new licence sales growth was 80% or more. That’s ten
times SAP’s 8% new licence sales growth rate in their most recently
completed quarter.”
Oracle chief executive officer Larry Ellison said, “SAP appears
to be rethinking its strategy as it loses application market share
to Oracle and confronts the difficulties of moving its application
software to a modern Service Oriented Architecture (SOA).
“They’ve just announced that they are delaying the next version
of SAP applications until 2010. That’s a full two years behind
Oracle’s scheduled delivery of our SOA Fusion applications,” said
Ellison.
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