Oracle beats quarterly revenue estimates as demand for its cloud services rises

(Reuters) -Oracle beat first-quarter revenue estimates on Monday, boosted by growing demand for its cloud offerings from companies deploying artificial intelligence.

Shares of the Austin, Texas-based company rose 5.2% in trading after the bell.

Oracle’s push into the cloud computing market is showing promising results and the company has started narrowing the gap with market leaders Microsoft and Amazon Web Services.

Oracle Cloud Infrastructure (OCI) remains strong and sustained demand for cloud compute is expected, particularly in AI applications.

The company also announced a partnership with AWS, Oracle Database@AWS, that allows customers to access Oracle Autonomous Database and Oracle Exadata Database Service within AWS.

Analysts believe Oracle’s resilient, sticky and largely recurring revenue stream positions the company well in a post-pandemic environment. They are encouraged by the underlying organic recurring revenue growth trend and believe the cloud transition continues to advance.

Oracle’s largest unit, cloud services and license support, posted a 10% rise in first quarter revenue to $10.52 billion, from $9.55 billion a year earlier.

Revenue for the quarter stood at $13.31 billion, compared with analysts’ estimates of $13.23 billion, according to LSEG data.

(Reporting by Juby Babu in Mexico City; editing by Alan Barona)