Exadata Servers Play Role in Oracle’s Cloud Growth

Oracle continues to grow its cloud business during the first quarter of its fiscal 2017 year. The move to the cloud hasn’t entirely left Oracle’s server hardware business behind, though, as Exadata-engineered server systems play a supporting role in the cloud growth.

For the quarter, Oracle reported revenue of $8.6 billion, for a two percent year-over-year gain. Net income was reported at $1.8 billion, for a five percent improvement over the first quarter of fiscal 2016.

Oracle continued to highlight its growing cloud business as the future of the company, with first quarter cloud revenue for both Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS) and Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS) coming in at $969 million, for a 59 percent year-over-year gain.

The hardware business is going in a different direction than cloud, with total hardware revenue for the first quarter reported at $996 million, for a 12 percent decline from the first quarter of 2016. That said, there are some bright spots in Oracle’s server portfolio, specifically the Exadata engineered systems.

Oracle co-CEO Safra Katz commented during her company’s earnings call that engineered systems grew in the mid double-digits. The leading engineered system for Oracle during the quarter, the Exadata database machine, grew revenue by over 30 percent.

Oracle’s other co-CEO Mark Hurd also took the time to praise the Exadata servers during the earnings call.

Exadata Available On-Premises or in the Cloud Now

“Exadata as a Service has been a very strong PaaS offering,” Hurd said. “You can now get Exadata in the cloud, as you can get it on on-premise. “

Hurd added that the Exadata as a Service offering is not counted in the 30 percent growth numbers for engineered systems, but rather is counted as part of Oracle’s PaaS cloud revenues.

Exa-class engineered server systems play a strong role overall in Oracle’s cloud infrastructure, which is now in the process of being updated to a second generation of service data centers.

“These new data centers give us the significant cost and performance advantage over Amazon Web Services,” Oracle CTO, Larry Ellison said.

“Plus, our new bare-metal offering makes it possible for our customers to lift and shift their entire existing corporate infrastructure, data and applications without any changes whatsoever and move it to the Oracle Public Cloud,” Ellison continued. “You just can’t do that with Amazon Web Services.”

Oracle’s earnings come just ahead of the company’s OpenWorld event, which gets started on Sunday, September 18.

“At Oracle Open World this Sunday, we are announcing the latest version of our database, and it’s going to be available in the cloud, on Exadata,” Hurd said. “We expect customers to consume some of it on-premises, but also a significant amount of their new database consumption is going to be in the cloud.”

Sean Michael Kerner is a senior editor at ServerWatch and InternetNews.com. Follow him on Twitter @TechJournalist