While those figures appear stellar, the acquisitions that Oracle has made make it difficult to figure out what the company's core, organic growth is (as opposed to growth derived from adding sales of purchased companies to its revenue base). There are no year-on-year comparisons for its hardware business, for example.

To continue growing at its current pace, Oracle may have to keep acquiring companies. But there are fewer and fewer companies that are large enough to make a difference to the vendor's bottom line, once they are absorbed. One good sign: sales of new software licenses, an indicator of new-customer wins and fresh demand, increased during the last quarter by 29 percent to $2.2 billion.

Oracle shares rose by $0.73 to close at $32.14 Thursday. They edged up by $0.58 late afternoon Friday, trading at $32.72.

Red Hat, which also sells to large enterprises, said Wednesday that its fourth quarter revenue increased 25 percent year-over-year to $245 million. Subscription revenue was $773.4 million, up 21 percent. Profit jumped to $33.5 million from $23.4 million.

"With record bookings and billings in the fourth quarter, we are on a run rate to become the first pure-play open source company to achieve a billion dollars in revenues next fiscal year, a milestone achievement for Red Hat and the open source community," said CEO Jim Whitehurst, in a . Whitehurst ascribed the strong results in part to sales of virtualization and middleware products to customers who are modernizing their data centers, preparing their infrastructure for cloud computing.