Oracle Earnings Takeaways: IaaS Gaining Importance

“The growth in revenue from our cloud business has overtaken new software license declines on an annual basis”, Safra Catz, Oracle chief executive said during the earnings call on March 15.

Oracle corporate headquarters in Silicon Valley.

Customers may be more interested now than before in part because of the company’s Bare Metal Cloud infrastructure offering, which was introduced at its OpenWorld conference in San Francisco a year ago. Wall Street analysts had been expecting the company to post earnings of 62 cents per share, coupled with $9.255 billion in revenues. Three investment analysts have rated the stock with a sell rating, thirteen have given a hold rating and twenty-seven have given a buy rating to the stock.

This past year, the company strengthened IaaS and PaaS offerings with the acquisitions of Dyn and NetSuite.

The Software-as-a-service (SaaS) and Platform-as-a-service (PaaS) business hit $1 billion, up 74 percent in constant currency. Company’s distance from 20 day simple moving average is 1.40% and distance from 50-Day simple moving average is 5.64%. DA Davidson set a $52.00 price target on shares of Oracle and gave the company a “buy” rating in a report on Tuesday, November 22nd. BTIG Research reissued a “buy” rating and issued a $47.00 price target on shares of Oracle in a report on Sunday, December 4th. Rather he focused on the company’s relatively smaller IaaS business, which generated only $178 million last quarter and grew only 2 percent over the previous year. Stifel Nicolaus maintained the stock with “Buy” rating in Friday, September 23 report.

Oracle’s progress in the cloud over the past 3-4 years has defied all the skeptics and the company has built a formidable cloud franchise.

Oracle shares surged by almost 6% to $43.05 during after-hours trading on the day the earnings were reported.

Total shares held by institutions as of the most recent company filings are 2,158,894,294 with a reported 98,405,291 bought and 103,586,321 sold.

Trailing twelve month Free Cash Flow dropped by over 6% to $11.8 billion due to higher capital expenditures. During the same quarter in the prior year, the business earned $0.64 EPS. Sunbelt Securities Inc. boosted its position in Oracle by 0.4% in the fourth quarter. Moreover, Brighton Jones Limited has 0% invested in Oracle Corporation (NYSE:ORCL). The number of shares now owned by investors are 6.16 bln.

According to the the latest analyst ratings which have been released, 9 brokers have issued a rating of “buy”, 12 brokers “outperform”, 12 brokers “hold”, 2 brokers “underperform” and 0 brokers “sell”.

About: Oracle Corporation develops, manufactures, markets, sells, hosts, and supports database and middleware software, application software, cloud infrastructure, hardware systems, and related services worldwide. The number of shares now owned by investors are 4.08 bln.

Oracle Corp. shares soared to a record Thursday after the maker of database software signaled growing demand for cloud-based services that compete with Amazon.com Inc. and Salesforce.com Inc. In terms of performance, year to date, the stock is 44.39%. Taking notice on average true range by J. Welles Wilder, it was 0.39. (NASDAQ:MU) stock have an ABR of 1.42.