Oracle Corp. gave its investors a bit of temporary relief today with a fairly solid fiscal second-quarter performance that came in just above expectations.

The database giant reported earnings before certain costs such as stock compensation of $2.33 billion, or 61 cents per share, up from $2.21 billion, or 52 cents per share a year ago. Net profit came to 80 cents per share, which was just above the analyst consensus of 78 cents.

Wall Street was also predicting Oracle’s total revenue to fall from last year’s period, but instead it remained largely flat. For the second quarter, Oracle hit $9.56 billion in revenue, only slightly down from the $9.59 billion it posted in the same period last year. Analysts were predicting revenue of just $9.52 billion.

The better-than-expected performance was largely driven by Oracle’s biggest business segment, which is its cloud services and license support division. The unit pulled in $6.64 billion in revenue, just above the consensus estimate of $6.63 billion.

In a statement, Oracle co-Chief Executive Mark Hurd said he believes there’s plenty of room for more substantial growth in this segment. “ERP has always been the largest segment of the enterprise applications business, so we have lots of room to grow as customers migrate from their traditional on-premise ERP to the Oracle Fusion ERP Cloud,” he said.

The potential for growth might be there, but whether or not Oracle can convince customers is another question. According to analyst Patrick Moorhead of Moor Insights & Strategy, the likelihood is it won’t.

“Oracle had better than expected earnings, which bodes well short term,” Moorhead told SiliconANGLE. “Long-term, this doesn’t usurp the fact that Oracle is years behind AWS and Azure in infrastructure as a service and platform as a service and I don’t see many customers seeing them as a viable alternative right now.”

The short-term boost was enough to bolster investor confidence, at least. In the after hours trading session, Oracle’s stock rose 5 percent.

“I suspect that Oracle is benefiting from showing bit of life after a generally ghastly time for tech stocks and broader markets,” said analyst Charles King of Pund-IT inc. “The company’s performance during the past quarter was anything but stellar but modestly beating analysts’ estimates appears to have offered existing and prospective shareholders room for optimism.”

The stock may also have been helped by Oracle’s second-largest business, cloud license and on-premises license, which saw revenue of $1.22 billion, just above the $1.19 billion Wall Street was hoping for.

Another possible reason as to why Oracle’s stock jumped is the steady progress it’s making with regards to converting revenue from licenses to subscriptions, which makes the company more valuable from a shareholders’ perspective, Holger Mueller, principal analyst and vice president at Constellation Research Inc., told SiliconANGLE. However, he still raised concerns about Oracle’s reduced capital expenditure in the quarter, which he said is necessary because it needs to keep investing into its data center capacity.

“But then again Oracle really has its future in its own hands as it has to convince existing customers to move to the cloud and so its capital spending must remain in harmony with that growth,” Mueller said. “Any news on capacity challenges and waiting lines to move to the cloud in the next months would be an indicator for that. But as Oracle has avoided any news on this topic, there is little concern it could become an issue.”

Another key from the quarter, he added: “There was no major replacement news of Oracle installs in the last earnings cycle. As long as Oracle can keep these customers, those revenues are ‘money in the bank’ that Oracle needs to convert to cloud revenue.”

Elsewhere the quarter was a typically busy one for Oracle, which said it landed major new customers Chegg Inc. and Western Digital Corp. among others. The company also hosted its annual customer conference, Oracle OpenWorld, which demonstrated not only its cloud ambitions but also the ground it needs to make up on its rivals such as Amazon Web Services Inc., Wikibon analyst James Kobielus said in his analysis of the event.

Oracle further announced a number of new products in the quarter, including a new serverless computing framework aimed at developers. It also made several acquisitions in the quarter designed to bolster its cloud services, buying a startup called goBalto Inc. that offers a cloud platform for managing clinical trials, plus sales intelligence firm DataFox Inc. Software-defined wide area network company Talari Networks Inc. was also acquired in November.

All of these developments were overshadowed, however, by the departure of one of Oracle’s key executives, Thomas Kurian, who had served for decades at the company. His most recent role was president of product development, where he was tasked with leading the company’s cloud strategy. But he reportedly fell out with Oracle Chairman Larry Ellison over the best strategy to grow the company’s cloud business, arguing that it should make more of its software available on public clouds such as AWS as a way of diversifying from its own infrastructure.

Ellison reportedly disagreed, and that difference of opinion led Kurian to quit and take up a new role at rival Google LLC just a few weeks later. Oracle has yet to replace Kurian, which raises further questions about its ability to challenge its rivals in the cloud.

As for the next quarter, Oracle co-CEO Safra Catz told analysts the company is looking at earnings of 83 to 85 cents per share. That’s more or less in line with Wall Street’s forecast of earnings of 84 cents.

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