Oracle shares go south as revenue results fall short of forecasts
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Oracle (NYSE:ORCL) shares fell as much as 5% in after-hours trading Thursday as the enterprise-software giant reported fiscal third-quarter sales that, while up from a year ago, fell just shy of Wall Street's expectations. 
Oracle (ORCL) said that for the period ending February 28, it earned $1.22 a share, excluding one-time items, on revenue of $12.4B., while analysts that follow the company had forecast it to earn $1.20 a share, on $12.42B. During the same period a year ago, Oracle (ORCL) earned $1.13 a share, excluding one-time items, on $10.5B in revenue.
Like many leading tech companies, Oracle's (ORCL) business has seen some negative effects of a strengthening of the U.S. dollar, as the company said such a factor had a five-cents-a share impact on its earnings.
Oracle (ORCL) has also been criticized for being late to the cloud-services party, which has resulted in it having to play catchup to rivals such as Microsoft (MSFT), IBM (IBM) and even Amazon (AMZN). Revenue from cloud services and license support rose 17% from a year ago, to $8.92B, while cloud license and on-premise revenue was flat, at $1.3B.
The company added that revenue from its acquisition of Cerner added $1.5B to its quarterly sales.
Along with its results, Oracle (ORCL) raised its quarterly dividend payment by 25%, to 40 cents a share.