Cloud computing will eventually come to dominate IT, so almost every hardware and software manufacturer has to have a cloud strategy of some sort.
Oracle Corp.’s moves in this are have been paying off, according to the company’s latest financial report.
The company said that in its fiscal Q4 total revenues were up three per cent to $11.3 billion (all figures in U.S dollars). Of that software-as-a-service (SaaS) and platform-as-a-service (PaaS) revenues were the fastest growing part, up 25 per cent to $322 million.
For fiscal year 2014, total revenues were up three per cent at $38.3 billion. SaaS and PaaS revenues were up 23 per cent to $1.1 billion while cloud IaaS revenues were $456 million.
True, new software sales and licence updates were the biggest part of the overall annual revenue (a combined $27.6 billion.) Even hardware sales ($5.4 billion) were more than cloud sales. But it’s the growth of cloud that catches the eye.
This includes SaaS solutions for customer experience, human capital management, ERP, enterprise performance management and others.
“We plan to increase our focus on the cloud and become number one in both the SaaS and the PaaS businesses,” Oracle CEO Larry Ellison said in a statement. He also declared his company is the number two SaaS company in the world, behind Salesforce.com.
“Our cloud subscription business is now approaching a run rate of $2 billion a year,” said Oracle president and CFO Safra Catz. “As our business has transitioned, more software revenues are being recognized over the life of a subscription rather than upfront. We’re making this transition to cloud subscriptions and ratable revenue recognition while continuously increasing our top-line revenue and our bottom-line profits year-after-year.”
Meanwhile, total hardware system revenues — servers, storage and networking — over the 12 month period compared to the year before.
On Friday Oracle (Nasdaq: ORCL) announced has signed an agreement to acquire LiveLOOK, a provider of real-time visual collaboration technology for co-browsing and screen sharing that allows customer service and sales agents to collaborate with consumers.
Oracle has over 100 global customers using LiveLOOK’s co-browse technology as an embedded part of Oracle Service Cloud offering.
Oracle said one benefit of the deal is that LiveLOOK customers will benefit with a more seamless path to the Service Cloud suite.