New software license revenues, which are considered a key indicator of IT executives' current attitudes toward new projects and spending, jumped 7 percent to $2.4 billion.

Earlier in the year, Oracle had posted second-quarter results that showed only 2 percent growth in new software license revenue. That was viewed by market watchers as a harbinger of possible bad news for the vendor.

"It's clear from these [third-quarter] numbers that Q2 was an aberration," co-president Safra Catz said during a conference call on Tuesday. "We feel good about all of our product lines."

Oracle sought to place the third-quarter hardware results into a certain context, as officials have repeatedly stated the company has no interest in competing in the commodity hardware market, and instead is focusing on specialized systems like the Exadata database machine, which provide higher profit margins.

"This past quarter Oracle delivered the hardware and software for our new extreme-performance Exalytics In-Memory Machine," Oracle CEO, Larry Ellison said in a statement. "At the core of Exalytics is our new in-memory database technology capable of instantaneous big data analysis; questions are answered at the speed of thought."