Oracle stock soars 11% after showing good progress in its battle in the cloud (ORCL)
Oracle
Oracle's quarterly profit blew past analysts' estimates as the business software maker's big push towards cloud-based products and services paid off.
In recent after-hours trading on Wednesday, the company's shares were up more than 11 percent to $51.55.
Oracle said cloud-computing and on-premise software business revenue rose 5.3 percent to $8.88 billion in the fourth quarter ended May 31. The business accounted for 78 percent of total revenue for its fiscal 2016.
The company has been shifting to a cloud-based service as customers increasingly shun the costlier licensing model, a pattern also adopted by rivals such as Microsoft, SAP and Amazon.com.
In an effort to strengthen its cloud business, Oracle signed a deal with AT&T in April, under which the U.S. telecom company agreed to move some of its large-scale databases to Oracle's cloud platform.
Oracle had said it expected more of its "big customers" to migrate their databases and database applications to its cloud service in the coming year.
NetSuite, which Oracle acquired in 2016, is also expanding its data center footprint to take on nimbler rivals such as Workday and Salesforce.com.
Oracle's net income rose to $3.23 billion, or 76 cents per share, in the fourth quarter ended May 31, from $2.81 billion, or 66 cents per share, a year earlier. Sales rose to $10.9 billion in the quarter, up 3% from the year-ago period.
Excluding items, Oracle would have earned 89 cents per share.
The company reported an adjusted revenue of $10.94 billion.
On that basis, Wall Street analyst had forecast the company would earn 78 cents per share on revenue of $10.45 billion, according to Thomson Reuters.
Through the close of regular trading Wednesday, Oracle's shares were up about 20 percent this year.