Oracle sees no slowing in earnings

Oracle remains committed to earnings per share growth of at least 20 percent or better each year, Safra Catz, Oracle's president and chief financial officer, said on Wednesday. "Twenty percent? That's for pikers. We've been growing 26 percent," Catz said at a meeting of Wall Street analysts on the sidelines of OpenWorld, the company's annual user conference in San Francisco. "We are going for 20 (percent). If we shoot ahead of it in any year, it is just the way it is. We are not slowing down and don't expect us to," Catz said of the pledge to grow not just 20 percent, on average, but 20 percent, or faster, each year.

Since completing its acquisition of PeopleSoft in late 2004, the company has grown earnings significantly faster than the 20 percent Chairman and Chief Executive Larry Ellison at that time pledged to investors. Oracle's strategy is to sell its big corporate customers more applications and, with them, the company's underlying database platform. "Our strategy will be selling customers we already have other stuff," she declared. "A few quarters ago I said our deals are getting chubbier. I said it exactly that way so you would remember it," Catz told analysts. "The deals continue to get chubbier," she said.

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