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Oracle Thanks Cloud for Sales Growth

Look no further than Oracle as an example of cloud growth and the growing opportunity it offers partners.

The Silicon Valley giant says revenue from its cloud services – including software as a service, platform as a service and infrastructure as a service – was up a whopping 45 percent in its last fiscal quarter, to $516 million.

“By [the fourth quarter of our 2015 fiscal year, March 1-May 31], we expect our new cloud bookings to exceed $250 million,” said Larry Ellison, Oracle’s chairman and chief technology officer. “Next fiscal year our new cloud bookings will be well over the billion-dollar mark.”

In the most recent quarter (ending Nov. 30) alone, Oracle increased its new cloud sales by more than 140 percent. The company’s Cloud ERP service – which helps companies transform their IT and back-office operations – now has more than 600 customers.

Oracle’s total sales in the last quarter were up just 3 percent, to $9.6 billion, showing the growing importance that cloud growth is playing in the company’s business — even if cloud still represents just 6 percent of its revenue. All of the details are outlined in Oracle’s second-quarter earnings report.

Just about any channel partner that’s looking to grow their business has already started selling cloud. As Tech Data noted earlier this year, the question for businesses has changed from “Should we use cloud services?” to “How should we use them?” Partners who haven’t ventured into the cloud yet are likely either close to retirement or will find themselves obsolete before long.

Analyst firm IDC predicted a year ago that public IT cloud-service spending will exceed $100 billion by the end of 2017 — and many insiders now believe that number will be higher. Our sampling of analysts finds that annual growth is forecast to be between 20 and 30 percent over the next three years.

Follow senior online managing editor @Craig_Galbraith on Twitter.