Many questioned Oracle’s controversial purchase of Sun Microsystems which took much longer to complete than expected due to government scrutiny of the deal. Skeptics raised concern that Oracle didn’t know anything about running a hardware company, much less one that was floundering to make a profit.
Once the deal was finally completed, more questions were raised about how long it would take Oracle to get Sun’s business turned around. But as Datamation details, Oracle had some positive news about Sun server sales in its latest earnings report that included a very healthy profit for the big database supplier.
Oracle easily hurdled analysts
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estimates in its fourth quarter thanks in part to brisk enterprise demand for Sun servers, raking in sales of $9.6 billion.
That led the database, enterprise software and server giant to post a profit of $3 billion for the quarter, or $0.60 a share, excluding one-time charges and special items. A survey of analysts by Thomson Reuters had pegged the Redwood Shores, Calif. database and business applications software vendor for a profit of $0.54 a share on sales of $9.5 billion.