Oracle Corp. delivered its fiscal first-quarter results today, beating expectations on profit and revenue thanks to several important customer wins and solid growth in its cloud applications and infrastructure businesses.

The database giant reported a profit before certain costs such as stock compensation of 93 cents per share on revenue of $9.37 billion, up 2% from a year ago.

That was better than expected, as Wall Street had forecast earnings of 86 cents per share on revenue of $9.19 billion.

“Our cloud applications businesses continued their rapid revenue growth,” Oracle Chief Executive Safra Catz (pictured) said in a statement. “Our infrastructure businesses are also growing rapidly as revenue from Zoom more than doubled from Q4 last year to Q1 this year. I have a high level of confidence that our revenue will accelerate as we move on past COVID-19.”

On a conference call with analysts, Catz stressed that Oracle’s mix of business is becoming “increasingly favorable” and said that its growth businesses are now larger than its older declining businesses.

“Our Fusion SaaS momentum is very strong,” Catz said. “We’re seeing the success of Autonomous Database, which will continue to get even better now that we have Autonomous Database available on Cloud at Customer.”

Oracle’s cloud services and license support business, which accounts for the bulk of its revenue, saw sales grow by 2% from a year ago, to $6.95 billion. Within that segment, applications, cloud services and license support pulled in $2.8 billion, up 4% from a year ago. Infrastructure cloud services and license support added an additional $4.13 billion, up 1%.

Oracle’s smaller cloud license and on-premise license business pulled in $886 million in revenue, up 9%.

The company said revenue for its Fusion Cloud ERP Suite grew 33% year-over-year, while NetSuite ERP gained 23%. The company said Fusion ERP now has more than 7,300 customers, while NetSuite ERP has 23,000.

“We’re not surprised to see strong cloud Fusion ERP and NetSuite ERP revenue as Oracle’s customers transition to the cloud to both reduce costs and increase reliability,” said Ian Campbell, chief executive at Nucleus Research. “Future revenue growth will hinge on Oracle’s ability to compete against the increased pressure from Microsoft, IBM and AWS to win cloud deals. In Oracle’s favor, the company, like IBM, can build on a strong installed base of existing enterprise customers to feed their cloud, and ultimately top-line growth.”

One of Oracle’s most notable customer wins in the quarter was McDonald’s Corp., which said it will migrate its North American financial systems to Oracle Cloud Infrastructure. Oracle also revealed that Albertsons Cos. Inc. is adopting its Oracle Cloud HCM platform.

In the call with analysts, Oracle founder and Chief Technology Officer Larry Ellison said the company’s ability to offer both applications and cloud infrastructure is an advantage that will strengthen over time. He said cloud infrastructure is accelerating database moves to the cloud.

“We’re not slowing down, we’re speeding up,” Ellison said. “Oracle Database Cloud at Customer is functionally identical to the Oracle database in the public cloud. That’s why we’re seeing the migrations going both places. They’re going to Database Cloud at Customer, which is a unique Oracle offering and they’re going directly into our public cloud. We are seeing very rapid adoption of Oracle Database Cloud at Customer among our very largest customers, and this is just the beginning.”

Constellation Research Inc. analyst Holger Mueller said Oracle had delivered on expectations under tough market conditions, and that its next task is to show it can maintain steady growth while avoiding the usual blips that seem to occur every five or six quarters.

“It’s good to see Oracle’s capital expenditures are similar to a year ago, at $1.6 billion, which points to its cloud investments,” Mueller said. “The bad news is that Oracle did not grow in North America. Still, that contraction was offset by the other geographies, especially in Europe, Middle East and Africa, where it grew more than 20%.”

Oracle took an important step toward its goal of becoming a top-tier cloud infrastructure provider during the quarter, announcing that its flagship Autonomous Database was being made available to customers to use within their own data centers via Exadata Cloud@Customer. It also announced managed cloud regions of data center equipment and services that can be located in customers’ data centers for a monthly fee.

In recent weeks, it has been speculated that Oracle might be interested in buying TikTok’s U.S., Canadian, Australian and New Zealand business operations from its Chinese owner ByteDance Ltd. But Catz asked analysts to refrain from asking about this during the call.

For the second quarter, Oracle said it’s expecting earnings of between 98 cents and $1.02 per share, versus Wall Street’s forecast of 94 cents per share in earnings. Oracle’s stock rose more than 4% in after-hours trading.

Photo: Oracle/Flickr