Database and applications giant Oracle earned $4.5 billion in revenues during the first quarter of its financial year, up 26% from $3.6 billion in the same quarter of last year.

“We reported new software license revenues up 35%, the strongest growth of any quarter in ten years,” said Safra Catz, Oracle’s President and CFO. The company’s profit grew by a quarter, reaching $840 million from $670 million in last year’s first quarter. 

Revenue from new application licenses grew by 65%, from $228 million to $376 million. This figure demonstrates that Oracle’s heavy acquisition activity since 2004, which has taken in such household-name applications as JD Edwards and Siebel, is paying off.

The fact that Oracle has its own database and middleware lines to sell does not appear to be scaring customers off its application range, as some critics of the strategy had predicted. 

Total application revenues – including support and maintenance – grew by 35% from $931 million to $1.2 billion. Two major acquisitions of the past year, those of business intelligence vendor Hyperion and product lifecycle management toolmaker Agile Software, contributed $87 million towards this growth.

Meanwhile, the database and middleware divisions, which Oracle conflates in its financial reports, grew total revenues 22% from $1.8 billion in last year’s first quarter to $2.2 billion this time around. New license revenues for the divisions rose 23%, from $576 million last year to $711 million this year. 

Oracle CEO Larry Ellison said he expected the company’s middleware division to outgrow that of the current market share leader, IBM. “If we continue to grow our middleware software business at the same rate we grew it this quarter,” he said, “Oracle will challenge IBM for the number one position in middleware by the end of this year.”

Further reading

Oracle buys itself leadership in BI - Hyperion acquisition explained

Oracle looks towards SAP eclipse