Oracle's latest quarterly earnings rose 18% as companies splurged on more software and other technology toward the end of the year.
The results announced last night are an improvement from Oracle's previous quarter, when the business software maker's revenue dipped slightly from a year earlier.
Oracle said it earned $2.6 billion, or 53 cents per share, in its fiscal second quarter. That compares with net income of $2.2 billion, or 43 cents per share, a year ago.
If not for charges for past acquisitions and certain other costs, Oracle said it would have earned 64 cents per share. On that basis, Oracle topped the average earnings estimate of 61 cents per share among analysts.
Revenue increased 3% from last year to $9.1 billion - about $900m more than analysts had projected.
The latest quarter spanned the months from September to November.
That makes Oracle the first technology bellwether to provide insights into corporate spending since the November re-election of President Barack Obama and negotiations to avoid the ''fiscal cliff'' began to heat up in Washington.
In a particularly heartening sign, Oracle said sales of new software licenses and subscriptions to its online services climbed 17% from last year to outstrip the most optimistic predictions issued by management three months ago.
The flow of new licenses and subscriptions, which represent about a quarter of Oracle's revenue, is closely tracked by investors because they spawn more revenue in the future from upgrades.
The solid performance by the California-based company suggest corporate decision makers are not yet fretting too much about the economy falling off a fiscal cliff and plunging into a recession.
The fiscal cliff refers to the combination of wide-ranging increases in taxes and wrenching cuts in government spending that will be automatically triggered January 1 unless the Obama administration and Congress can reach an agreement on how to soften the impact.
The spectre of higher taxes prompted Oracle to make the unusual decision to bunch the next three quarters of stock dividends into a single payment that will be made before the end of the year.
The move, announced earlier this month, is designed to ensure that Oracle chief executive Larry Ellison, who owns a 23.5% stake in the company, and his fellow shareholders do not get hit with a higher tax bill on dividend income next year.
Oracle would have fared even better if it could find a way to sell more computer servers and other hardware, something it has been unsuccessfully trying to do since completing its $7.3 billion acquisition of Sun Microsystems in 2010. The company's hardware revenue plunged 16% from last year.
