Oracle has released its third quarter earnings, reporting better-than-expected income but worse-than-expected sales. The big bright spot in the report was the company’s cloud computing growth. Software as a service (SaaS) and platform as a service (PaaS) sales climbed 57 percent to $583 million, and income from these offerings climbed 51 percent.
CTO Larry Ellison boasted that the strength of Oracle’s cloud computing products “should make it easy for us to pass Salesforce.com and become the largest SaaS and PaaS cloud company in the world.”
Despite the good SaaS and PaaS news, Oracle’s infrastructure as a service sales declined 2 percent. Overall, the company’s revenue fell 3 percent. In addition, on-premise software sales declined 4 percent and hardware revenue was down 13 percent.