Oracle (ORCL): Tech Prospers (NT)(MSFT)(GOOG)(JAVA)

By Douglas A. McIntyre Updated Apr 28, 3:18AM EDT · Published Sep 19, 5:41AM EDT

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Cammonopoly_wideweb__430x3250 Shares in some tech companies are down as far as the banks and brokerage firms. Sun (JAVA) and Nortel (NT) are in that group, but they are hardly alone. Firms which have the lead of their sectors, especially Microsoft (MSFT) and Google (GOOG) have experienced significant drops in their market caps. Both stocks are down over 30% so far this year.

Larry Ellison, the third richest man in America, gave Bill Gates and the founders of Google a reason to rejoice. The company he founded, Oracle (ORCL), did much better than expected last quarter and hinted that the trend would continue for the portion of the future it can see.

Oracle’s fiscal first quarter earnings were up 29% to nearly $1.1 billion. Revenue rose 18% to $5.3 billion.

It should have been expected that sales from software upgrades would be good, and they were. Many large companies cannot afford going without the improved and more efficient products.

What was surprising is that Oracle said new software sales were still relatively strong. IT spending at larger enterprises is not moribund as some on Wall St. expected.

Oracle made one more encouraging remark which was that it was not being murdered by a drop in spending in the financial services sector.

Due to its tremendous size and operations around the world, Oracle is a near-perfect prism for looking at the picture of big tech.

IT spending is fine which means that many of the stocks in the sector are oversold.

Douglas A. McIntyre

About the Author Douglas A. McIntyre →

Douglas A. McIntyre is the co-founder, chief executive officer and editor in chief of 24/7 Wall St. and 24/7 Tempo. He has held these jobs since 2006.

McIntyre has written thousands of articles for 24/7 Wall St. He is an expert on corporate finance, the automotive industry, media companies and international finance. He has edited articles on national demographics, sports, personal income and travel.

His work has been quoted or mentioned in The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, Los Angeles Times, The Washington Post, NBC News, Time, The New Yorker, HuffPost USA Today, Business Insider, Yahoo, AOL, MarketWatch, The Atlantic, Bloomberg, New York Post, Chicago Tribune, Forbes, The Guardian and many other major publications. McIntyre has been a guest on CNBC, the BBC and television and radio stations across the country.

A magna cum laude graduate of Harvard College, McIntyre also was president of The Harvard Advocate. Founded in 1866, the Advocate is the oldest college publication in the United States.

TheStreet.com, Comps.com and Edgar Online are some of the public companies for which McIntyre served on the board of directors. He was a Vicinity Corporation board member when the company was sold to Microsoft in 2002. He served on the audit committees of some of these companies.

McIntyre has been the CEO of FutureSource, a provider of trading terminals and news to commodities and futures traders. He was president of Switchboard, the online phone directory company. He served as chairman and CEO of On2 Technologies, the video compression company that provided video compression software for Adobe’s Flash. Google bought On2 in 2009.