Oracle founder Larry Ellison has told the world that he expects Oracle’s IaaS and PaaS business to “accelerate into hyper-growth” over the coming year.
Strong SaaS sales dramatically improved the company’s fiscal in the fourth quarter and full-year 2017 results.
SaaS sales grew 76 percent to $1 billion in the fourth quarter pushing Oracle’s overall cloud revenues up 66 percent $1.4 billion. Total revenues for the quarter rose four percent to $10.9 billion.
Although IaaS and PaaS growth was 45 percent in the fourth quarter, rising to $403 million, Ellison predicted Oracle’s IaaS and PaaS business will soon grow so fast it will “be even bigger than our SaaS business”.
He said that during the new fiscal year, Oracle’s PaaS and IaaS businesses to accelerate into hyper growth, the same kind of growth it was seeing with SaaS.
Ellison, who is now Oracle’s CTO, also used the call to make his ritual traditional jibe at Salesforce, claiming fiscal 2017 was the second year in a row Oracle sold more cloud annual recurring revenue than its SaaS rival.
He said that Oracle’s rapid SaaS growth was the driving force behind Oracle’s revenue and earnings growth in Q4.
“The reason we are confident that we will pass Salesforce is because we have a three-fold SaaS application suites for ERP, for HCM and for CRM including financials, procurement, supply chain, manufacturing, human resources, payroll, marketing, sales and service. Salesforce in contrast only competes in three of these nine market areas,” he said.
