By Juby Babu
(Reuters) -Oracle beat estimates for quarterly results and forecast second-quarter revenue growth above estimates on Monday, boosted by growing demand for its cloud offerings, sending its shares up over 9% in trading after the bell.
The Texas-based company's push into the cloud computing market is showing promising results and it has started narrowing the gap with market leaders Microsoft (NASDAQ:MSFT) and Amazon (NASDAQ:AMZN) Web Services.
Oracle (NYSE:ORCL) Cloud Infrastructure remains strong and sustained demand for cloud compute is expected, particularly in AI applications.
"Oracle reported a good quarter with 8% constant currency growth and slightly better than expected earnings. The company continues to benefit from a strong cloud business and is investing in that business further," said Gil Luria, senior software analyst at D.A. Davidson.
The company also announced a partnership with AWS, Oracle Database@AWS, that allows customers to access Oracle Autonomous Database and Oracle Exadata Database Service within AWS and the general availability of Oracle Database@Google Cloud.
With the partnership, Oracle is "growing its big database opportunity across Microsoft Azure, Google (NASDAQ:GOOGL) Cloud, and AWS by making it simpler for customers to connect data across clouds and applications – and driving new revenue opportunities," said Rebecca Wettemann, CEO of research firm Valoir.
Oracle's cloud services revenue rose 21% to $5.6 billion in the first quarter.
Revenue for the quarter ended Aug. 31 stood at $13.31 billion, compared with analysts' estimates of $13.23 billion, according to LSEG data.
Excluding items, the company earned $1.39 per share, above estimates of $1.32 apiece.
Remaining Performance Obligations (RPO), the most popular measure of booked revenue, was up 53% to $99 billion in the quarter.
For the second quarter, Oracle expects revenue to grow between 8% and 10%, the midpoint of which is above analysts' estimate of 8.72%.