Oracle Reports 20 Percent Quarterly Growth

With sales of its flagship database and middleware software surging, Oracle closed out its fourth quarter and fiscal year on a high note, reporting earnings of $1.6 billion (up 23 percent) on sales of $5.8 billion (up 20 percent) for the three months ended May 31.

For all of fiscal 2007 Oracle reported that revenue increased 25 percent to just under $18 billion and net income grew 26 percent to $4.3 billion. "We had a very strong quarter and a very strong close to the year," co-president and CFO Safra Catz said during a conference call. "The story for the year is that we grew all our businesses faster than the market, taking market share from SAP, from BEA and IBM."

Oracle reported that new software license revenue, a key growth indicator, increased 17 percent in the fourth quarter to $2.5 billion. Total software revenue (which includes new licenses, updates and product support) increased 19 percent to $4.8 billion.

New license sales of database and middleware products rose 18 percent to $1.8 billion during the three-month period. "We were very pleased with how databases did during the quarter," co-president Charles Phillips said on the call, adding that the company saw demand for both new add-on database products like the recently announced Database Vault and older options such as Oracle Enterprise Manager and security and partitioning products.

CEO Larry Ellison said on the call that double-digit growth in Oracle's technology products, which includes database and middleware software, would likely continue for the foreseeable future. Phillips said the upcoming July 11 unveiling of a new release of the database, Oracle Database 11g, could begin a round of product upgrades and accelerate database sales in the new fiscal year.

New license sales for applications grew at a slower pace in the quarter, 13 percent, to $726 million. While application sales growth was strong in Europe, growth in North America was slower than a year ago. Ellison said the latest quarter "was a very tough comparison" because sales were so strong a year earlier. He said he expects robust application sales growth in North America in fiscal 2008.

For all of fiscal 2007 application new license revenue grew 32 percent to $1.7 billion while database and middleware new license revenue grew 16 percent to $4.2 billion.

For the current quarter Catz projected that total revenue would grow between 19 percent and 21 percent with new license revenue growth in the range of 20 percent to 30 percent.