Market watchers have been closely monitoring the performance of Oracle's hardware division since it completed the Sun acquisition in January 2010.

Oracle has been de-emphasizing low-margin commodity hardware sales. The results show that its strategy of focusing on high-end machines such as Exadata and Exalytics, which combine Sun servers with Oracle software, is working well, executives said during a conference call Monday.

Sales of these "engineered systems" more than doubled year over year, according to co-President Mark Hurd. "I think what we saw in Q4 was some pretty material movements in terms of existing customers buying many more," Hurd said.

Revenue from the "Exa" systems will increase as companies see their performance, according to CEO Larry Ellison. "While the systems are very, very fast right now, they're getting even faster," he said.

This creates two opportunities for Oracle, Ellison said. Oracle can reach "the number-one position in high-end systems," he said. But because the Exa systems are x86-based, they offer good cost-to-performance and will help Oracle take share from its rivals' commodity server businesses as well, he said.