Oracle Falls Slightly After Q2 Earnings

Oracle ORCL is down more than one percent in after hours trading after the company announced its second quarter earnings results. The company reported a Q2 EPS of $0.69 versus the Street estimate of $0.67. Earnings per share were up eight percent from the year-ago period. Revenue arrived at $9.28 billion versus the Street estimate of $9.18 billion. Sales were up two percent year-over-year. "We're very pleased with our results as new software license and cloud software subscription revenue grew 1% in constant currency over the 18% growth reported last year," Safra Catz, Oracle President and CFO, said in a company release. "Software revenue grew 5% helping drive our tremendous cash flow and for the first time ever, we generated more than $15 billion in operating cash flow over four quarters." "Our hardware business, including support, grew 2% in constant currency this quarter driven by double-digit revenue growth in Exadata, Exalogic and Exalytics," added Oracle President Mark Hurd, who was also quoted in the press relaese. "The SPARC SuperCluster and Big Data Appliance were even better, with triple-digit growth and we expect hardware products will show growth next quarter." "Our billion dollar SaaS business delivered overall bookings growth of 35% in the quarter," said Oracle CEO Larry Ellison, who was quoted in the press release as well. "Our fastest growing cloud services were Fusion Human Capital Management and Fusion Salesforce Automation, each growing bookings at a triple-digit rate." Heading into earnings, Oracle closed at $34.70 (up 3.18 percent). Year-to-date, the stock has been experiencing a bit of a roller coaster ride, falling just over three percent. Oracle is said to be reorganizing its sales force and patching up its relationship with Hewlett-Packard. If true, the new partnership could be very valuable to investors of both stocks. Disclosure: At the time of this writing, Louis Bedigian had no position in the equities mentioned in this report.