Revenue from new software license sales, which provide a key insight into a vendor's growth and how customers are feeling about IT spending, rose 29 percent to $2.2 billion year over year.

Hardware systems sales were $1 billion, down slightly from the second quarter's total of $1.1 billion. No comparison to the same quarter last year could be made, as Oracle only completed its purchase of Sun Microsystems on Jan. 27, 2010.

However, Oracle's "hardware product gross margins increased to 55 percent in the quarter so we are now completely confident that we will exceed the $1.5 billion profit goal we set for the overall Sun business for the current fiscal year," co-President Safra Catz said in a statement.

All geographic regions had revenue growth of 30 percent or more, with strong sales for the Exadata and Exalogic appliances, co-President Mark Hurd said in a statement.