Oracle Chair and Chief Technology Officer Larry Ellison speaks at the Oracle OpenWorld conference in San Francisco on Sept. 16, 2019.
John DiFucci from Guggenheim Securities said he was "blown away." TD Cowen's Derrick Wood called it a "momentous quarter." And Brad Zelnick of Deutsche Bank said, "We're all kind of in shock, in a very good way."
That's how the analysts opened their comments and questions during Oracle's quarterly earnings call on Tuesday, as the company's stock price was in the midst of a 28% after-hours rally. The software vendor had just reported an earnings and revenue miss, but nobody was paying attention to that.
Wall Street was singularly focused on Oracle's forward-looking numbers and a massive growth trajectory that the company now sees thanks to its booming cloud infrastructure business and a host of new artificial intelligence deals.
"There's no better evidence of a seismic shift happening in computing than these results that you just put up," Zelnick said on the earnings call.
Analysts are often effusive in their praise of companies on their earnings calls after results beat expectations or a forecast is particularly impressive. Executives are used to being congratulated on an excellent quarter.
But the latest Oracle call was different, and investors knew why.
Based on its post-market move, Oracle's stock is poised to surge more on Wednesday than it has in any single session since the dot-com boom in 1999. And the shares, trading at $310 in extended trading, are set to zoom past their record close of $256.43, which they hit last month. Oracle's market cap would jump past $870 billion.
The excitement is mostly around cloud infrastructure, where Oracle competes with Amazon , Microsoft and Google . Oracle said that revenue this fiscal year in that business will jump 77% to $18 billion from $10 billion in the last year.
In fiscal 2027, the figure will almost double to $32 billion, before reaching $73 billion, $114 billion and $144 billion in the subsequent three years.