Oracle posted strong earnings that beat both internal forecasts and analyst estimates, which added further heft to Chairman and CTO Larry Ellison’s traditional boasting of customer wins at the expense of rivals during the quarter.

Oracle reported $12.3 billion in revenue for the second quarter of its 2023 fiscal year, which was between 18% and 25% higher than the previous year depending on how you want to look at currency fluctuations. Regardless of that stipulation, that result came in $200 million higher than Oracle forecast and was 2% higher than analyst expectations.

The vendor’s cloud services and license support services revenues increased as much as 20% year over year to $8.6 billion for the quarter. Cloud license and on-premises license revenues surged 16% to $1.4 billion. The vendor’s recently acquired Cerner operations contributed $1.5 billion in revenues for the latest quarter.

Net income growth was even more substantial, surging from a loss of $1.2 billion last year to a $1.7 billion gain this year.

Oracle CEO Safra Catz also produced robust expectations going forward. Catz expects revenues to grow up to 19% year over year for its third fiscal quarter, boosted a bit by Cerner. Specific to its cloud operations and including Cerner, revenues are forecast to surge up to 47%, with full fiscal-year cloud revenue not including Cerner to increase more than 30%.

That confidence echoed Cisco’s recent strong forecast for full-year revenue growth.

Ellison used his considerable time on the earnings call to tout Oracle’s numerous customer wins during the quarter. He stated multiple customers signed contracts in excess of $1 billion during the quarter, according to a transcript of the call, and that many of the new customers were taken from rivals, specifically oft-targeted Amazon Web Services (AWS) and SAP.

Ellison named biosciences firm Oxford Nanopore Technologies as having moved workloads from AWS to Oracle Cloud Infrastructure (OCI); contract wins from Emirates Health Services, Cross Country Health Services, and Henry Schein medical supplies against SAP; and replacement of SAP at Italian bank Nexi Group and TD Bank.

The outspoken executive also touted Oracle’s recently expanded partnership with Microsoft to allow customers to use cloud services from both providers.

“We have a number of companies running applications in Azure, and then Azure is connected to OCI, so the database is in OCI and the application is in Azure,” Ellison said.

Oracle also recently scored a cloud renewal with AT&T for the telecom giant to continue to run its internal databases and applications on the vendor’s cloud platforms.

Oracle’s forward-looking confidence should be bolstered by having recently been included as part of the Department of Defense (DoD) $9 billion Joint Warfighting Cloud Capability (JWCC) Procurement decision alongside rivals AWS, Microsoft Azure, and Google Cloud Platform (GCP).

The contract, which was initially touted as the Joint Enterprise Defense Infrastructure (JEDI) proposal, allows the DoD to purchase commercial cloud capabilities and services directly from those vendors.

Oracle was not initially included in the JEDI contract process, but gained access along with Google as part of the reconfigured JWCC proposal.

“Capturing JWCC is a huge boon for OCI, which drastically trails AWS, Azure, and GCP by a large margin in revenue and market share,” Forrester Research Senior Analyst Tracy Woo noted in a report. This could place OCI as the fourth cloud provider in the U.S. And Oracle has a major on-premises presence in government. Adoption of Oracle’s cloud services means potential avenues for growth in government applications for hybrid and public cloud workloads.”