Oracle finally sees revenue growth from hardware business

Oracle has finally seen a boost from its server business, with hardware sales up 8% in its latest financial results.

Hardware has been a drag on the IT supplier’s finances since the acquisition of Sun Microsystems in 2009, but Oracle’s third quarter results showed 8% growth, with $725m revenue. This compares with a 3% year-on-year decline reported in the company’s previous quarterly figures.

The results follow research by IDC, published earlier this week, which showed Oracle gaining server market share at the expense of its rivals.

“Oracle’s Engineered Server Systems, including Exadata and Sparc SuperClusters, achieved over a 30% constant currency growth rate in the quarter, while throughout the industry traditional high-end server product lines are in steep decline,” said Oracle CEO, Larry Ellison.

Overall, Oracle revenue increased 4% to $9.3bn, with net income up 2% to $2.6bn.

Oracle chief financial officer Safra Catz also claimed that cloud software subscriptions revenues grew 25% in the quarter, based on constant currency exchange rates.

“Oracle cloud applications and engineered systems are both rapidly growing, billion dollar run-rate businesses. Those two high-growth businesses helped us deliver record year-to-date operating cash flow, and a record $15bn of operating cash flow over the past 12 months,” she said.

Other highlights of the financial results included: New software licences and cloud software subscriptions revenues up 4% to $2.4bn; software licence updates and product support revenues up 5% to $4.6bn.

“Our quarterly cloud application revenue is now approaching $300mn. All of our strategic cloud application suites, including Fusion Enterprise Resource Planning, Fusion Human Capital Management and Fusion Customer Experience, posted triple-digit revenue growth,” said Oracle president Mark Hurd.