Oracle declares itself 'second largest SaaS company in the world' but misses profit estimates

Oracle misses revenue forecasts but fully expects to become dominant cloud services provider

Oracle's fourth quarter profits missed estimates as the firm attempts to shift its focus and persuade enterprise users it has legs as a software-as-a-service (SaaS) provider.

For the period ending 31 May 2014, Oracle's total revenues amounted to $11.3bn (£6.6bn), short of analyst estimates of something over $11.5bn (£6.75bn). Net income, meanwhile, dropped by four per cent to $3.7bn (£2.2bn).

The worse than expected results have been attributed to Oracle repositioning itself as a vendor of cloud-based software rather than its traditional licensed products, but Oracle chief financial officer Safra Catz told analysts and investors that the firm fully expects to overcome the blip as it moves towards the cloud.

"We've successfully grown the company's revenues and earnings through every transition, whether it was many computer databases to a complete suite of products, client-server Internet, hardware engineered systems and now on-premise cloud," she said, speaking on a conference call. "We are well under way with our most recent transition."

Indeed, the firm saw its SaaS and Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS) revenues rise by a quarter to $322m (£189m).

As a result, CEO Larry Ellison is confident the company is moving in the right direction, declaring Oracle to be "the second largest SaaS company in the world", behind Salesforce.com. Ellison was keen to point out some of the rival firms that Oracle is ahead of.

"In IaaS we're larger and more profitable than Rackspace. We have by far the most complete portfolio of modern SaaS and PaaS products in the industry: CRM; sales, service & marketing; HCM: HR, payroll & talent; ERP: accounting; procurement; supply chain and more. All these SaaS products run on the world's most powerful PaaS: the Oracle in-memory multitenant database and Java," he said.

"We plan to increase our focus on the cloud and become number one in both the SaaS and the PaaS businesses," Ellison added.