Oracle beat expectations during its fiscal third quarter of 2020, and on Thursday reported $9.8 billion in revenue, a 2% increase compared to last year and its strongest growth in nearly two years.

On a conference call with investors, Oracle CEO Safra Katz called it a “remarkable quarter” fueled by Oracle’s subscription revenue, which includes cloud services and software updates. “The quarter demonstrated the acceleration of revenue that I've been forecasting,” she said, according to a Seeking Alpha transcript. “Those subscription revenues for the quarter were $6.9 billion, up 5% and accounted for nearly 71% of total company revenues, up from 69% last year. License revenues were $1.2 billion, the same as last year.”

And while other tech companies have blamed the coronavirus (COVID-19) for recent revenue declines — because of supply chain disruptions and market uncertainties — Oracle, thus far, seems immune. “We’re largely conducting business as usual with some modifications such as using video conferencing and asking our employees to postpone nonessential travel,” Katz said. “It’s not yet clear what the effect that the virus will have on our customers and suppliers and, as a result, what the impact will be on our business in Q4.”

Despite this uncertainty, however, she expects the subscription, cloud, and product update part of Oracle’s business to continue to grow “with minimal impact from the virus in the quarter.” Katz forecast fourth-quarter subscription revenue to increase between 3% and 5%, and said she expects total revenue between negative 2% and positive 2%.

Oracle recently said it plans to hire 2,000 employees worldwide to join its Cloud Infrastructure business as part of a push to take on cloud giants Amazon and Microsoft.

Coronavirus concerns also didn’t slow Oracle co-founder and CTO Larry Ellison from doing what he does best: claiming Oracle Cloud’s superior speed and cheaper pricing compared to Amazon Web Services (AWS) and throwing competitors under the bus. Ellison’s prepared remarks on the investor call was essentially a list of customer wins and market-share steals.

Cloud enterprise resource planning (ERP) applications and its Autonomous Database infrastructure will “determine Oracle’s future,” Ellison said, adding that the company’s ERP competitors are struggling. SAP never rewrote their ERP applications for the cloud. And today, many of SAP’s largest customers are actively working with us to migrate from SAP to Fusion ERP in the cloud,” he said. “Workday, the other competitor, is seeing very little success in cloud ERP. Workday’s ERP market share is tiny compared to ours.”

Ellison said T-Mobile is moving its mission critical application that manages financing mobile device sales onto Oracle’s Gen 2 public cloud infrastructure. Gap is moving its retail applications and made a $6 million annual commitment to Oracle Cloud, he added.

Norfolk Southern is moving its warehousing environment off of Microsoft SQL Server and onto the Oracle database in its Gen 2 cloud, Ellison said. And brokerage firm Depository Trust and Clearing Corporation (DTCC) “is migrating their multi-terabyte Amazon AWS Redshift system out of Amazon and into our public cloud using the Oracle Autonomous Database,” he said. “They’re also moving their analytics from Amazon to the Oracle Analytics suite.”

DTCC says Ellison's claim is not true. “Oracle inaccurately reported during its Q3 earnings call that DTCC was migrating a ‘multi-terabyte data warehouse’ from Amazon Web Services to Oracle’s public cloud service,” a DTCC spokesperson said in an email to SDxCentral. “DTCC uses AWS to support a variety of business functions, and DTCC does not have any plans to move applications from AWS to Oracle.”