Oracle reported strong revenue growth from its cloud software services in the third quarter of fiscal 2013, while the company's overall revenue for the quarter was slightly down.

Its total revenue for the quarter was US$9bn – down 1% year over year. Its net income for the quarter was $2.5bn, remaining at the level it was one year go.

Revenue from new software licenses and cloud-software subscriptions was US$2.3bn – down 2%. Software license updates and support revenues were up 7%, reaching $4.3bn.

Broken out of the category, however, cloud-software revenue was up 111%, Oracle said.

Oracle president Mark Hurd, in his comments on the results, highlighted the revenue numbers from cloud services, which include Infrastructure- , Platform- and Software-as-a-Service. “In Q3, our SaaS revenue alone grew well over 100%, as lots of new customers adopted our sales, service, marketing and human capital management applications in the Cloud,” he said.

Oracle CEO Larry Ellison said the company will start delivering servers based on its new Sparc T5 processors. “The new T5 servers can have up to eight microprocessors while our new M5 system can be configured with up to thirty-two microprocessors,” he said.

“The M5 runs the Oracle database 10 times faster than the M9000 it replaces.”

The company made $671m in hardware system sales in the third quarter.