Oracle (Nasdaq: ORCL ) is showing signs of a market recovery. Maybe not for the entire world economy, nor necessarily an immediate bounce of the overall stock market, but the database giant does see an end to the misery in enterprise computing. And that's a heck of a start, with cascading benefits for the company and others.
A confident management team presented growth in both sales and in GAAP earnings per share. EPS was up 3% year over year to $0.26, and revenue hopped 2% to $5.5 billion. "Clearly we are extremely pleased with our spectacular Q3 results," said Chief Operating Officer Safra Catz. Now tell us how you really feel.
One analyst noted that Adobe Systems (Nasdaq: ADBE ) saw an uptick in order volume toward the end of the quarter in this week's report, and wondered whether Oracle saw the same pattern. Catz kicked it up a notch: "Every month looked on track," and so even though Catz cited a normal level of business near the end of the quarter, it was apparently smooth sailing all along for Oracle.
The end of the gloom?
Put this together with steady results from IBM (NYSE: IBM ) and Hewlett-Packard (NYSE: HPQ ) and you get a pretty rosy picture of the prospects for true giants in enterprise-class software. If that scenario plays out, we should see the benefits of this market's recovery cascading through the food chain in the coming months. Server specialists like Dell (Nasdaq: DELL ) would be first in line, and increased demand on that level will be great news for chip suppliers Intel (Nasdaq: INTC ) and AMD (NYSE: AMD ) as well.
Given Oracle's propensity for bashing the competition at every turn, it's telling that Larry Ellison and his crew hardly mentioned IBM at all in this quarter's conference call. "If you have nothing bad to say, don't say anything at all," is what I imagine Ellison's dear mother telling him back in grade school.
So I think that this bottom-mark is for real, and Oracle is both global enough and diversified enough that it's in a good position to make that call. Do you agree? Disagree? Pop on over to our Motley Fool CAPS community (it's fun, free, and only slightly addictive) and let us know. Or, just drop a line or two in the comment box below.
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