Oracle has been on a roll. Many, me included, did not think that Oracle would be able to so easily integrate its many acquisitions, much less bring their business into the high-gear growth that they’ve shown over the last few quarters.
Last week’s quarterly earnings report continued to impress. Oracle earnings grew 28 percent. New application licenses grew 64 percent and traditional database licenses grew 23 percent. There were 35,000 downloads of the new 11g database for Windows in the first month that it has been available.
“It was an all-around spectacular quarter for us,” Oracle Chairman and CEO Larry Ellison said. “We are very pleased.”
“We continue to take applications market share from SAP,” Oracle President Charles Phillips. “In Q1, Oracle’s applications new license sales grew 65 percent compared to SAP’s new license sales growth rate of 18 percent in their most recently completed quarter. We like our growth strategy of expanding into high-end, industry-specific vertical software as opposed to SAP’s growth strategy of moving down market to sell software to small companies.”
Clearly Microsoft, SAP, and IBM will need to evaluate and react to Oracle’s increased strength across the Enterprise software space.
