Oracle delivered a better-than-expected fourth quarter courtesy of strong hardware sales—notably an operating profit at Sun and strong sales of Exadata database machines. The company on Thursday reported earnings of $2.4 billion, or 46 cents a share, on revenue of $9.5 billion (statement, preview). Non-GAAP earnings were 60 cents a share, well ahead of the 54 cents a share expected by Wall Street. Sales were in line with expectations, but Oracle’s profit got a boost from better-than-expected hardware sales. Sun contributed about $400 million in non-GAAP operating income. You could call the performance Oracle’s Sun miracle. In a statement, Oracle CFO Jeff Epstein said Sun had $1.2 billion in systems revenue. Oracle president Safra Catz said: Now that Sun is profitable, we have increased confidence that we will meet or exceed our goal of Sun contributing $1.5 billion to non-GAAP operating income in FY2011, and $2.0 billion in FY2012. Also on the hardware front, Oracle CEO Larry Ellison talked up his pet project: The Exadata database machine. Ellison also took aim at IBM: Some of IBM’s largest customers began buying Exadata machines rather than big IBM servers in Q4 of FY2010. And the FY2011 Exadata sales pipeline is fast approaching the $1 billion mark. With all this talk about hardware, you could almost forget that Oracle is selling its database and applications.
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