Yesterday was a good day for billionaire technology mogul Larry Ellison.

Firstly, database, middleware and applications vendor Oracle – of which Ellison is founder and CEO – posted financial results that far outstripped the expectations of the market.

The company earned $5.31 billion in revenues during the financial quarter, up 28% from $4.16 billion in the same quarter last year. Profit growth was even stronger, growing 35% from the year ago quarter to reach $1.3 billion.

Most impressive of all, however, was growth in software licenses, which climbed 38% year-on-year to $1.67 billion.            

Meanwhile, NetSuite – the on-demand business applications suite provider in which Ellison holds a majority stake – debuted on the NASDAQ stock exchange yesterday and raised $161 million in a Dutch share auction. This gives the company a market capitalisation of $1.5 billion – not bad for a company that has never made a profit in nine years of trading. Ellison's stake in the company is reported to have dropped from 61% to 55% in the deal.

NetSuite’s initial public offering (IPO) raised $50 million more than that of software-as-a-service pioneer Salesforce.com when it floated in 2004, suggesting either that Wall Street is more convinced of the commcerical viability of the software-as-a-service model than it was three years ago, or that anything with Ellison’s name attached is seen as a safe bet.

But Ellison has not got everything he wished for this Christmas. SOA integration software vendor BEA, which Oracle has been fixing to acquire in the last two months, has persisted in its rejection of a $17-per-share offer from the larger company.

“We've concluded that no friendly deal can be done with the current BEA board at a price and terms acceptable to Oracle," Oracle CFO Safra Katz told analysts in the conference call following yesterday’s financial announcements. 

This suggests that 2008 will see a repeat of Oracle’s hostile takeover of PeopleSoft that began in 2003.

Further reading

Oracle looks towards SAP eclipse

NetSuite furthers platform play

Perks of the job Judging by a number of recent proxy filings, the era of the fat cat lives on.