Oracle reports strong Q2 financials

Oracle has announced that its second-quarter revenues exceeded its own expectations with a rise of four per cent to $US5.9bn.

The company's net income rose by 12 percent to US$1.5bn, while earnings per share grew by 15 percent compared with last year.

Oracle said that the results were substantially higher than expected, and had helped deliver the company's highest ever Q2 operating margins, creating US$8.4bn of free cash flow over the past 12 months.

New software licence revenues were up two percent to US$1.7bn, and software licence updates and product support revenues rose 14 percent to US$3.2bn.

The company said it had also seen growth of one percent in the Americas, and two percent in Asia Pacific, in its applications business.

The figures suggest that the anti-competiton concerns of the European Commission (EC) into Oracle's takeover of Sun Microsystems has not affected the company's position, despite the issue lasting all year.

Oracle also expects to see Sun rapidly improve its market share and margins once the merger closes.

The EC objected to the fact that Oracle, the largest proprietary database vendor, is buying Sun, the owner of MySQL, the most popular open-source database on the market.

Oracle argued that it will not threaten competition because its own database products are aimed at a different type of customer to Sun's.

The EC will announce its ruling on 19 January.