Oracle’s revenue, profit jump

Business software maker Oracle Corp. posted quarterly profit and revenue Tuesday that topped Wall Street forecasts on strong sales of new software.

The results eased investor concerns that big companies were tightening technology spending after German rival SAP missed a 2006 sales target.

“Their share of the enterprise application market is growing faster than SAP’s,” said Pat Walravens, a JMP Securities analyst.

Oracle Chief Financial Officer Safra Catz cited a strong performance across all product lines and said the world’s biggest database software maker turned in its strongest third-quarter growth in more than five years.

Sales of applications and database software beat Wall Street forecasts.

Catz said new software license revenue growth of 27% topped the company’s own expectations of an increase ranging from 16% to 22%.

“I was impressed to see the revenue came in nicely higher than the Street had expected,” said Kim Caughey, who helps manage about $1 billion of assets at Fort Pitt Capital Group. “These guys are on the first line of companies determining whether to spend more on infrastructure.”

Oracle has spent more than $20 billion buying such rivals as Siebel Systems and PeopleSoft over the last three years to challenge SAP.

Fiscal third-quarter profit rose to $1.03 billion, or 20 cents a share, from $765 million, or 14 cents, a year earlier. Excluding items, its per-share profit was 25 cents. Revenue rose to $4.4 billion from $3.47 billion.

Analysts, on average, were forecasting a per-share profit before items of 22 cents on revenue of $4.33 billion, according to Reuters Estimates.

Shares of Oracle rose 37 cents Tuesday to $17.55 and were up more than 3% in after-hours trading.