Though some observers had worried Oracle was in trouble after some disappointing second quarter results, Oracle stormed back in the third quarter to prove its naysayers wrong.
Oracle reported its third quarter fiscal 2012 financial results late Tuesday, reporting revenues of $9 billion for a three percent year-over-year gain. Net income was reported at $2.5 billion, an 18 percent year-over-year gain.
Oracle CEO Larry Ellison stressed during the analyst call that his company’s embrace of the cloud with the recent Fusion middleware update and the Oracle cloud will further differentiate them against rivals and especially SAP.
“Six years ago, we made the decision to rewrite our ERP and CRM suite for the cloud. We called it Fusion, SAP called it Confusion,” Ellison said. “We think it was the right decision six years ago and, as cloud computing has grown in popularity, we thank God that we’re sitting here with a complete ERP, CRM, HCM suite of applications, ground-up rewritten from scratch for the cloud, and SAP has yet to start.”
Ellison took a swipe at another competitor while stressing that Oracle has addressed customer concerns about cloud security. He noted that the Oracle Secure Cloud includes servers that run across multiple Oracle data centers and can also run behind customer firewalls.
“This is especially important to large customers who want the simplicity and convenience of cloud computing but are unwilling to accept the security risks inherent in multi-tenant public Internet clouds,” Ellison said. “Salesforce.com does not offer this kind of security in their cloud. This is a key advantage for us going forward.”
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Oracle Earnings Grow; Ellison Blasts SAP
Sean Michael Kerner is a senior editor at InternetNews.com, the news service of the IT Business Edge Network, the network for technology professionals. Follow him on Twitter @TechJournalist.