Coverage: Oracle shares jump after earnings

Oracle shares jumped as much as 9 percent in extended trading on Wednesday after the company beat earnings estimates for the fiscal fourth quarter.

Jordan Novet of CNBC.com reported the news:

Revenue for the quarter rose 3 percent. Subscription software reached more than $1 billion for the first time.

Oracle has been pushing hard in public cloud, aiming to compete with market leader Amazon Web Services (AWS). In May Oracle said AT&T would move thousands of databases to its cloud.

However, the second-generation cloud infrastructure that Oracle announced in September is “currently a bare-bones ‘minimum viable product,'” Gartner said in a major industry report last week. This marked the first year Oracle was included in the report.

In the fourth quarter, Oracle produced $208 million in cloud infrastructure as a service (IaaS) revenue, up 23 percent from the prior year. (Last quarter CEO Safra Catz predicted IaaS revenue would increase by 25 percent to 29 percent.)

Revenue at AWS jumped 42 percent to $3.7 billion in revenue in the first quarter.

Michelle Jones of ValueWalk reported that the company’s hardware sales fell:

Hardware revenues fell 13% year over year to $1.1 billion, while services revenues rose 3% to $894 million. Sales of new software licenses fell 5% year over year to $2.6 billion, although they still made up 24% of the company’s total revenues. Services revenues rose 3% year over year to $894 million. On-premise software revenues ticked lower by 1% year over year to $7.5 billion to make up 69% of total revenues.

Short-term deferred revenues rose 8% year over year to $8.2 billion. The company said the strengthening of the U.S. dollar trimmed 2 cents per share off its GAAP earnings and 1 cent per share off its non-GAAP earnings.

Oracle management said after selling $855 million in new annually recurring cloud revenue in the fourth quarter, the company surpassed its goal of $2 billion in annually recurring cloud revenue bookings for fiscal 2017. They also announced that AT&T has agreed to migrate thousands of databases and their associated applications and workloads to Oracle Cloud, and they expect more big customers to migrate their Oracle databases and applications as well.

Pushkala A and Laharee Chatterjee of Reuters reported that Oracle has been moving to cloud-based services:

The company has been shifting to a cloud-based service as customers increasingly shun the costlier licensing model, a pattern also adopted by rivals such as Microsoft Corp, SAP SE and Amazon.com Inc.

In an effort to strengthen its cloud business, Oracle signed a deal with AT&T Inc in May, under which the U.S. telecom company agreed to move some of its large-scale databases to Oracle’s cloud platform.

The company had said it expected more of its “big customers” to migrate their databases and database applications to Oracle Cloud in the coming year.

NetSuite, which Oracle acquired in 2016, is also expanding its data center footprint to take on nimbler rivals such as Workday Inc and Salesforce.com Inc.