Oracle late Thursday reported double-digit cloud growth and modest hardware gains in the company's fiscal fourth quarter ended May 31, but it fell slightly short of expectations for on-premises software sales and profitability. Executives said the miss was attributable to the company's success in the cloud, where it now places itself as the second-largest software-as-a-service (SaaS) provider.
"We're focused, like a laser, on becoming the number-one company in the cloud," said Oracle CEO Larry Ellison in a conference call with financial analysts.
Oracle is already the dominant SaaS provider in categories such as marketing, ERP, and human capital management, Ellison said, and added that the company's salesforce is focused on overtaking Salesforce.com in CRM and extending the company's lead over Workday in HCM and ERP.
Oracle changed its financial reporting practices to break out SaaS and platform-as-a-service (PaaS) revenues, for database and Java-development services, separately from software revenues and cloud infrastructure as a service (IaaS). SaaS and PaaS revenues were $322 million for the quarter, up 25% year over year, and $1.12 billion for the year, up 23% over fiscal year 2013.