Oracle profit slides 24% as customers move to the cloud

Oracle has reported a sharp drop in profit for the quarter just ended, with customers spending more on its cloud services but less on software that runs in their own data centers.

Chairman Larry Ellison portrayed the shift as a positive one and said Oracle can make more money selling cloud services over the long term. But the change didn't seem to help it much last quarter, when its results were also battered by the strong U.S. dollar.

Oracle's revenue and profit for the quarter, the fourth of its fiscal year, missed the forecasts of financial analysts, and its stock fell almost 7 percent after the results were announced Wednesday. Oracle's cloud business seems to be growing strongly. Revenue from software sold as a service climbed 29 percent from this time last year, to $416 million, the company said. But that's a relatively small part of Oracle's business, and it wasn't enough to offset mediocre performance elsewhere.