Oracle Corporation (NYSE:ORCL ) late Wednesday [Mar 15, 2017 | 3:59pm] posted market-beating fiscal third quarter earnings results, driven by strong cloud growth, and boosted its dividend payout by 27%.

Written by StockNews.com

The Redwood City, CA-based I.T. giant reported adjusted Q3 earnings per share (EPS) of $0.69, which was $0.07 better than the Wall Street consensus estimate of $0.62.

Revenues rose 2.9% from last year to $9.27 billion, also topping analysts’ view for $9.25 billion.

Oracle noted that its cloud software as a service (SaaS) and platform as a service (PaaS) revenues were surged 73% year-over-year, while Total Cloud Revenues, which include infrastructure as a service (IaaS), gained 62%.

The company commented on its multiple edges over its major competitors via press release:

“Over the last year, we sold more new SaaS and PaaS than Salesforce.com [CRM], and we’re growing more than 3 times faster,” said Oracle CEO, Mark Hurd. “If these trends continue, where we are selling more SaaS and PaaS in absolute dollars AND growing dramatically faster, it’s just a matter of when we catch and pass Salesforce.com in total cloud revenue.”

“Both our SaaS and PaaS businesses are doing great, but I’m even more excited about our second generation IaaS business,” said Oracle Chairman and CTO, Larry Ellison. “Our new Gen2 IaaS is both faster and lower cost than Amazon Web Services. And now our biggest customers can run their largest and most demanding Oracle database workloads in the Oracle Cloud — something that is absolutely impossible to do in the Amazon Cloud.”

Reflecting its expectations for strong growth, ORCL’s board of directors boosted its quarterly dividend payout by 27% to $0.19 per share, or $0.76 on an annualized basis. The company’s dividend yield based on the new payout is now ~1.76%.

Oracle Corporation shares jumped $1.23 (+2.86%) to $44.28 in after-hours trading Wednesday. Year-to-date, ORCL had gained 12.48% prior to today’s report, versus a 6.97% rise in the benchmark S&P 500 index during the same period.