Oracle Q1 EPS Tops Estimates (ORCL)

is trading up one percent in after hours trading after announcing a first-quarter EPS of $0.59. Earnings per share were $0.03 higher than

, and provided Oracle with an 11 percent increase from the year-ago period. Revenue arrived at $8.4 billion, which is slightly below Wall Street's $8.48 estimate. Sales were up two percent year-over-year. "Those record level earnings were enabled by an operating margin of 45 percent for the quarter," Safra Catz, President and CFO of Oracle, said in a

. "We also set a free cash flow record of over $6 billion in Q1, and then we returned half of that to our stockholders by repurchasing $3 billion of our shares in the quarter." "Next week at Oracle OpenWorld, we will announce the In-Memory Option for the Oracle database," added Oracle CEO Larry Ellison. "Virtually every existing application that runs on top of the Oracle database will run dramatically faster by simply turning on the new In-Memory feature. Our customers don't have to make any changes to their applications whatsoever; they simply flip on the in-memory switch, and the Oracle database immediately starts scanning data at a rate of billions or tens of billions of rows per second." Today's earnings could be a positive step forward for the company, which has had a rough time in 2013. Oracle plummeted 12 percent at the end of March. The stock slowly recovered, but it dropped another 12 percent in June. It has yet to fully rebound and is still down four percent this year. During the summer, Oracle announced a

with

. At the time of the announcement, Oracle said that the deal would encompass all three tiers of cloud computing: Applications, Platform and Infrastructure. In addition to the Salesforce partnership, Oracle also

with

to bring Oracle software to Windows Server Hyper-V and Windows Azure. Disclosure: