Larry Ellison, CEO of Oracle, has claimed that the company is "almost shutting out" human resources SaaS provider Workday in competitive deals in Europe.

"We’re at the stage where we’re winning the majority of deals and competes against Workday," Ellison claimed on a conference call with investment analysts. "We’re beating them in North America, and we’re almost shutting them out in Europe. It’s very, very exciting."

He made his comments as Oracle reported its latest quarterly financial figures. The company’s overall revenue rose 3% to $9.1 billion year-on-year in the three months ending 30 November.

That was driven in part by 17% growth in new software licenses and cloud computing revenues to $2.4 billion.

Total cloud revenues were $240 million. According to German investment bank Berenberg, this represents organic growth of around 12%, "which is very strong".

Oracle has made a number of cloud-related moves in the last couple of years, including offering its Fusion application range as cloud services and acquiring cloud providers Taleo and RightNow. These moves can be seen as defensive precautions against the likes of Salesforce.com and Workday.

Workday, which floated as a public company earlier this year, does not break out its European revenues. Speaking in November, CEO Anil Bhusri said that its European business "is growing quite a bit faster than the business in the US" but that "it’s coming off of a small number".

He said that company is only beginning to expand its sales organisation beyond the US. "Over time we’ll enter in really all of Europe … and so that’s all really still in front of us."

"The UK was our first big [international] market, and we’re doing very, very well in the UK," Bhusri added.

As usual, Oracle’s hardware sales plummeted during the quarter, down 16% to $1.3 billion. The company has said in the past that this decline reflects the fact that it is not interested in selling low-margin commodity servers from its acquired Sun Microsystems business.

Oracle said that sales of its ‘engineered systems’, such as Exadata and Exalogic, saw 70% quarter-to-quarter growth in bookings. "We sold more than 700 engineered systems this quarter, including Exadata wins at China Mobile, Facebook, Samsung, Time Warner Cable; and great Exalogic wins at Chevron, Vodafone and Wal-Mart," said co-president Mark Hurd.

Ellison defended the company’s acquisition of Sun Microsystems. "Sun has proven to be one of the most strategic and profitable acquisitions we have ever made,” Ellison said. “Sun technology enabled Oracle to become a leader in the highly profitable engineered system segment of the hardware business.”