Oracle saw sales of its applications in Europe increase 47% year-on-year in its latest financial quarter, suggesting that European organisations are investing in their business applications again.
Mark Hurd, the company’s co-president, described that growth as "simply huge". By comparison, Oracle’s arch rival in the applications market SAP grew European software revenues 25% in its latest quarter.
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Overall, Oracle’s revenue grew by 37.7% to $8.8 billion in the three months ending February 28 2011. That included a 29% increase in new software license sales to $2.2 billion. Net income rose 78% to $2.1 billion.
The company took the opportunity to talk up its cloud computing credentials.
"In Q3 we signed several large hardware and software deals with some of the biggest names in cloud computing,” said CEO Larry Ellison in a statement. "For example, Salesforce.com’s new multi-year contract enables them to continue building virtually all of their cloud services on top of the Oracle database and Oracle middleware."
Ellison’s choice of example is unlikely to have been arbritrary. At Oracle’s user conference last year, Salesforce.com CEO Mark Benioff publicly criticised the company’s cloud strategy.
"Clouds are not in a box," he said, referring to Oracle’s Exadata and Exalogic database and hardware systems. "Beward of the false cloud", Benioff added.
