New software licensing drives revenue, resulting in the highest gains for any quarter over the last decade New software licensing revenue growth — the highest in 10 years for the company — helped boost Oracle’s first-quarter financials.New software licensing revenue grew 35 percent to $1.1 billion, the strongest growth of any quarter in the past decade, the company reported on Thursday.Revenue for the period ending Aug. 31 was up 26 percent to$4.5 billion and net income grew by 25 percent to $840 million compared to the same quarter last year, based on generally accepted accounting principles. Earnings per share grew 28 percent to $0.16.Applications’ new license revenues helped drive growth, increasing by 65 percent over the corresponding period last year. Database and middleware new license revenue was up 23 percent, the highest growth rate in seven years for Oracle, the company reported. Oracle released a major upgrade to its database software during the quarter, helping to drive that increase. The company had 35,000 downloads of the software during the first month it was available.Oracle’s results significantly beat some analyst expectations, including those of Citi Investment Research. Citi expected 20 percent growth in overall new software licensing, 15 percent growth in database and middleware license revenue, and just 33 percent in applications. While database software is the historical focus for Oracle, the company is now hoping to become a dominant player in its two other lines of business: applications and middleware. Oracle figures it is number three in the middleware market, behind Microsoft and IBM. If Oracle and IBM continue to grow at their current rates, Oracle could pass IBM at the end of this year or early next year, Larry Ellison, CEO of Oracle, said during a conference call to discuss the earnings.In applications, Oracle is behind market leader SAP. The companies have different strategies for growth with Oracle trying to sell to its existing large company customers and SAP chasing small businesses, he said. “While we think the small business market is interesting because it’s large; we just haven’t figured out a way to make a substantial profit in that market,” he said. Oracle would have to build a new sales force, products, marketing, and advertising efforts in order to address the market, which doesn’t promise strong revenue, he said.Oracle’s applications business, with its continued focus on existing customers, has the potential for huge growth in the future, he said. “We’re just at the very beginning in terms of penetrating this market,” Ellison said. The business includes products that Oracle sells to companies like telecommunications operators. Those companies typically use custom software, some of which they may have installed as long as ten years ago, said Charles Phillips, president of Oracle. So part of Oracle’s challenge is to convince these companies that off-the-shelf software from Oracle can work, he said. For the current quarter, Oracle expects new software license revenue to grow 15 percent to 25 percent from a year earlier and total revenue to grow 19 percent to 21 percent. Earnings per share this quarter should be $0.20 to $0.21, up from $0.18 for the corresponding period last year, Oracle said.This story was updated on September 20, 2007 Technology Industry