Larry Ellison (Photo: Oracle)
Larry Ellison (Photo: Oracle)

Oracle Corp., which has been pushing hard — perhaps too hard — to build its cloud business, today reported cloud Software as a Service (SaaS) and Platform as a Service (PaaS) revenue of $690 million for its fiscal fourth quarter, ended May 31, up 66 percent year over year in U.S. dollars.

Oracle said it added more than 1,600 new SaaS customers, and more than 2,000 new PaaS customers, during the quarter.

“We expect the SaaS and PaaS hypergrowth experienced in FY16 to continue on for the next few years,” said Larry Ellison, executive chairman, founder and CTO.  The company predicted FY17 Q1 SaaS and PaaS revenue will increase by 75-80 percent over the year-ago period. “That gives us a fighting chance to be the first cloud company to reach $10 billion in SaaS and PaaS revenue,” Ellison said.

Oracle on June 1 was hit by a federal whistleblower lawsuit in which a former accountant alleged she was pushed to use accounting practices that inflated Oracle’s apparent cloud earnings. Most recently, on June 15, Oracle and plaintiff Svetlana Blackburn agreed that Oracle could have until August 15 to respond to the suit. (The case is Blackburn v. Oracle America, 3:16-cv-02925-EDL.)

Total cloud revenue, including Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS), was $859 million, up 49 percent in the quarter. Total quarterly revenue was $10.6 billion, down 1 percent. So cloud revenue accounted for 8 percent of quarterly revenue. Net income was $2.8 billion, or 66 cents per share.

Full FY16 cloud SaaS and PaaS revenue was $2.2 billion, up 49 percent year-over-year in U.S. dollars. Full-year total cloud revenue, including IaaS, was $2.9 billion, up 36 percent. Total full-year revenue was $37 billion, down 3 percent. So cloud revenue accounted for 7.8 percent of full-year revenue. Net income was $8.9 billion, or $2.07 per share.

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