Ensuring its house is in order for its new President Mark Hurd, who is fresh off the boat from his role of CEO at HP, Oracle reported revenue growth of 48% to US$7.5 billion for the first quarter of its 2011 fiscal year yesterday. Total revenues were up by 50%.

Both revenue increases exceeded what analysts expected.

Oracle said a growth in software licence updates and product support revenue is behind its Q1 win, this helped push its earnings per share up to $0.27, an increase of 20% on last year's figure, according to Oracle CFO Jeff Exstein.

"We executed better than expected on both the top and bottom line for the quarter," Epstein said.

"Our hardware business also grew faster than we expected with Sun Solaris servers and Exadata leading the way."

According to reports, Oracle plans to heavily back its hardware business over the coming year. Hurd   made his debut in his new role during a press conference, saying Oracle would debut two new high-end systems coming Sun Hardware with oracle software at Oracle Openworld next week.

"We will invest over $4 billion in research and development this year, so our already robust product portfolio is only going to get stronger," Hurd said.

The news comes following more publicity for Hurd, this time resulting from comments made by IBM CEO Sam Palmisano, who criticised Hurd, accusing him of hindering growth at HP by cutting back on research and development.

"HP used to be a very inventive company," Palmisano told the Wall Street Journal on Tuesday."Hurd cut out research and development so there's no research and development left at HP."

Hurd has no public comment regarding Palmisano's comment. 

A report on Bloomberg today quoted a person close to HP's board saying HP is close to announcing a successor for Hurd, and that it is leaning towards choosing an internal candidate. 

Hurd recently resigned from HP following an internal investigation which found he had made inaccurate expense claims and concealed a relationship with events contractor Jodie Fisher, 

The short list, the report said, includes Vyomesh Joshi, head of HP's printer business, its head of personal computing Todd Bradley, Dave Donatelli who runs the storage and server unit, Ann Livermore, executive vice president of enterprise business and Tom Hogan, the executive vice president of its enterprise sales and marketing division.

According to the report directors met this week to discuss their decision.